The following comment might seem off-topic, but it's not. There are well-known techniques to propaganda, and it is important that we recognize them by now or we will continue to be victimized by it. Also, we cannot wait until we have certain evidence of propaganda to point it out: It's very rarely certain that something is propaganda - that would be poor execution indeed, violating its basic purpose - so we cannot give propaganda the benefit of the doubt, wait for certainty to call it what it is, and therefore empower it. That benefit of the doubt is normal, healthy good faith, but propaganda is a parasite on good faith; good faith is a tool of manipulation for propaganda, used to take advantage of others.

Here are some techniques I know; I'd be interested in more or where I can find useful research and expertise about it:

* Create uncertainty. The strategy is not to persuade people, but to create enough uncertainty to disable them and disable debate. One way to do this is to question every possible flaw in the evidence; in reality, nothing is so clear-cut that there aren't questions (and that especially applies to intelligence operations).

* Make many baseless claims in order to force others onto defense and occupy all their resources. A baseless allegation takes seconds to make but hours or days to defend. Also, many people remember only the first headline, the baseless allegation, and don't see the followup story. Again, it's a way of disabling debate.

By design, it's tough to deal with propaganda - it's tough to continue intelligent, valuable discussion in the face of it. I'm not sure of the answer, but comments matching those techniques, such as the parent, seem to appear when Russia is discussed, for example.

One thing I do is to look for whether the comment adds substantive knowledge to the debate, or whether it just increases uncertainty about others and includes baseless information (unsubstantiated claims and rumors). Do I know more about the subject after reading the comment, or less?

EDIT: Clarified my purpose in the first paragraph.