I think part of the problem is that many protests tend to have broad goals protesting a broad problem

They’re much more effective when it’s “Hey, that law you passed, the X act? Get rid of it, and we’ll chill” or “give us a law that protects against Y and we’ll chill”.

The specific message allows for easy buy in, makes it hard to misrepresent their demands, and gives a clear path for politicians to calm things down and resume normalcy.

Like for example, protesting “gun violence” is too broad, it’s hard to get sustained but in, easy to distort what they actually want to drum up opposition, and vague to fix, but if you were to protest and demand “we want to raise the age to buy guns to 21”, that’s very specific, there’s no questioning what they want, it’s really easy to know which side you’re on, and it makes it VERY clear what needs to be done for the protests to stop. I’m not trying to make any specific arguments here, rather just providing an example about what I think works better.

Protesting to express frustration over a problem and saying “please do something” is much less effective than “we demand this law be stricken down” or “we demand this law be put in place”. But in the US specifically, a lot of protests have been more vague, which doesn’t mean they’re invalid in what they’re upset about, but the vagueness of demands make sustained buy in difficult, make disinformation campaigns easier to leverage against it, and give politicians too much leeway in how to handle it, so they kind of fizzle out because it’s unclear when enough has been done to meet demands.

Compare this to France’s current “don’t raise the retirement age”, it’s very clear what they want, and if their politicians want to quell unrest, it’s very clear what needs to be done, if they simply do not raise the retirement age, things go back to normal immediately, and it’s kind of hard to distort such a simple demand