> I've watched RT on a few occasions and I never thought their reporting outright propaganda.
This is the problem. For effective propaganda you don't want it to be easily detectable as such. Therefore the majority of your material isn't directly propaganda. I read somewhere it's 5-10% is the payload. You don't make that obviously propaganda of course too.
On a channel like RT or Sputnik this is how you are going to operate - not least because those channels are for an external audience, who does have other sources.
Inside of Russia your propaganda probably works roughly similarly, but you can have more of it, and you can be more confident the audience doesn't regular access other sources. In a time of war you can go full propaganda.
I've watched RT in the past and been surprised by some of the reporting, and covering things that seemed not really covered by regular sources.
The problem is because of what it is it's very hard to know what's real reporting and what is propaganda payload.
So I avoid it.
I don't think there is a problem limiting it's availability. Right now it's super freely available.
What's the bar you might ask? That's hard. Partly it's intent, and that's hard to prove. You could also work out how much and how bad the propaganda is on a channel. Again not necessarily easily.
Really though the problem here is a trust problem with Putins Russia. It's well documented their activities in disinformation and with election interference.
They are not currently a good actor. This is covered in part of Hypernormalization documentary (and others).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT0bzehQgO8
If you believe this is the case (as I do) then the bar for their restriction is actually pretty low. I think it's in the interest of the world that access to propaganda vehicles, such as RT and Sputnik, should be limited.