Well, for one it creates an impression that "common people" of Russia are against Putin (which is false, he regularly gets 70+ percent approval ratings [1]), and this might discourage more severe economic sanctions against Russia (because sanctions would affect those "common people" more than they would affect oligarchs)

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/896181/putin-approval-ra...]

I don’t understand this logic. How is it in interest of the propaganda machine to make it appear that common people are against Putin? Surely they want to portray that majority like him and support his actions (which is also why they manipulate these stats you linked).

Also, Putin and his elite don’t actually give a damn about sanctions affecting “common people” (see eg post-Crimea sanctions), so I don’t see why they’d worry so much about it as to fabricate every single post on Reddit.

I think Russia has enough control over their home media that it actually can produce two separate narratives: one for the West, other domestic.