It's not acceptable to attack fellow community members like this on HN. Critiquing the article is fine, as is flagging it if you think it's unfit for HN. But personal attacks are not OK, no matter who it is or why you think it's justifiable. Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to keep participating here.
Since you're speaking as a moderator I'd like to ask for clarification on the official position:
Was that actually a personal attack, or was it a verifiable claim about the quantity and type of submissions by this user? Is the problem that it was labeled "propaganda", and would it have been ok without that word?
I thought it was useful context to have a look at the submission history. There is a slew of recent [dead] submissions. At what point is it fair to call that out? Or is it about the wording?
It's generally not OK to bring up someone's past activity, whether that activity be on HN or elsewhere, as way of attacking someone in a discussion on HN. It fits within the "generic tangents" guideline. We can never know if they still agree with what they said or posted in the past. The submitter's history, and indeed the submitter's identity, is not really relevant to the substance of the article, and we want the discussion to be about the substance of the article. (Of course it's relevant if the submitter is the author, because then they can engage in Q&A about the article's content.)
If users notice that someone is posting large volumes of low-quality content (i.e., spam, self-promotional content or articles that break the guidelines) they can email us and we'll investigate.
In this case the user in question just posts a lot of stuff from mainstream publications on either side of the ideological centre – i.e., lots from the NY Times, Washington Post and The Atlantic but also WSJ and Bloomberg. The articles that are [dead] are from sites like The Information that are only banned due to being hard-paywalled.
It's obviously inflammatory to describe their pattern of posting as "propaganda". (Sure it can be argued and debated in the right context, but this is not that.) But even without the word "propaganda", the guidelines still ask us to keep discussions on-topic and to avoid generic tangents.
