How to know you're being tricked by Russian propaganda

DEBUNKING Russian propaganda is now an industry - unfortunately, a rather useless and misguided one. The awkwardly named European External Action Service East Stratcom Task Force provides the latest exercise in futility. The agency, which is part of the European Union (EU) bureaucratic machinery, has gathered several thousand examples of disinformation in the first searchable database of its size, a culmination of its work since 2015.

It is a gold mine for connoisseurs of Kremlin-sponsored narratives. A search for the German chancellor's name, for example, yields gems such as "Angela Merkel Offers Congratulations on a Child Marriage", "Angela Merkel is a Fuehrer of the Fourth Reich", "Angela Merkel Has a Complex of an East German Woman", "Angela Merkel Took a Selfie with a Suicide Bomber" and "Angela Merkel Is the Daughter of Adolf Hitler".

After the laughter comes a serious question: How does one debunk that kind of thing? The task force certainly tries. In response to the "Fourth Reich" item published on a Czech-language site, it writes: "Angela Merkel is a democratically elected leader; any parallel to the Nazi Third Reich is unsubstantiated."