I don't think that a comment on Hacker News is the right place for me to write an expository essay, but I was making reference to a few things in particular. Before I briefly respond I should point out that I don't necessarily think propaganda is inherently bad, it's just a fact of democracy and the need to influence large groups of people to a particular viewpoint. There's a huge negative connotation in the term, but propaganda in a lot of ways is no different socially than advertising.

1. Both the far right and the far left are utilizing memes and "fake news" on social media in order to influence opinion through directed propaganda. This is a relatively new development, because social media is a relatively new development. Interestingly, politicians on the left and similar activist groups have been far more effective and successful in this regard, partly because they're often the first to make use of new platforms and they tend to be managed and composed of younger audiences which innately are more familiar with the social media territory including the uses of meming. If you look back to the early 2000s you'll see that social media was an important gathering place for activists and organizers on the left preparing for the push after the 2nd term of Bush and how effective social media was in helping the election of Obama. Not all of this was strictly propaganda, but a lot of it was.

2. Most of the basic techniques of manufacturing and spreading propaganda were created far before the Internet was even a concept. Many of them were explicitly created and used by the Left as a method to organize people across wide geographic areas to do coordinated activities. This is most strongly associated with the way that Marxist rebellions occurred in many parts of the world in the early parts of the 20th century. This later morphed under these Leftist government to adopt some of the propaganda techniques developed during WWII by both sides of the conflict along with other new techniques in order to effectively control the populace after they seized power. Probably the primary outcome of this, and a doctrine which was extensively used by the USSR in particular, was the creation of the model for agitprop. Agitprop continues to be created to this day and is an effective method of inculcating ideas into a populace and shifting the Overton window. It's used by Leftists in Hollywood to help influence the viewpoint of Americans and those abroad, and in some cases is used through the US's worldwide cultural influence to spread the ideas of democracy itself. I reiterate that propaganda isn't necessarily inherently bad.

3. The Gerasimov Doctrine doesn't exist. Not only that, if it /did/ exist, the outcome of it is that it makes the US look weak and particularly makes Trump/Republicans look weak on the international stage. While there is strong evidence that the Russian government influenced the outcome of the 2016 election in the US, this does not in and of itself imply that this is "right-wing propaganda" or that it's necessarily a tool of the Right. The person who originally coined the term "Gerasimov Doctrine" has written an editorial on this topic [1]

[1]: http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/05/im-sorry-for-creating-th...