The causes might be more or less proximate to the generation but the only ‘reasonable’ arguments I can think of are that they were mentally incompetent to know what they were doing or otherwise so negligent that they were unaware they were installing, configuring and providing power and Internet access to the agent. And in the case that they installed some device that reasonable was for some other purpose and they were unaware that the manufacturer of that device had configured it to generate hit pieces, then the manufacturer should be held responsible for it doing so.