I think this hinges on one's definition of propaganda. I believe most propaganda starts as being spread by state actors - but the majority of the spread is pr

I think this hinges on one's definition of propaganda. I believe most propaganda starts as being spread by state actors - but the majority of the spread is probably done by normal citizens. If an intelligence agency was directly posting false or misleading information on HN for the purposes of influencing readers, presumably if HN mods found evidence of this they would try to restrict it to the extent possible. The much more challenging issue is that once a propaganda meme has taken hold in a normal citizen, they will also spread these ideas. This creates a nearly-impossible to moderate situation where a percentage of the population sincerely holds a belief and chooses to spread it. For example: in recent threads about the release of Snowdens book, there were some comments that presented ideas as fact which are contradicted by publicly available evidence. I think it is fair to call this 'propaganda', in the sense that many of these ideas were likely deliberately crafted by intelligence orgs at inception, but these is no actionable moderation that can occur to prevent it. Impossible to tell if someone spreading an incorrect fact is doing so out of sincere belief or ulterior motive. I agree that it seems like more propaganda has been appearing on HN in the past couple years, but sadly I think it is impossible to do anything to prevent it.