Yeah, I always found it really valuable to know a person on the other side. Obviously, they're not immune to propaganda either, but even just seeing the differences in propaganda can teach you a lot, both about which parts may be untrue, but also how propaganda works.

For example, I once saw a guy on Mastodon, who posted a populist Indian news article and expressed his agreement. The article was about some policy the EU was discussing, following Putins attack on the Ukraine, which would've affected India.
That policy was controversial here in the EU. I don't remember what policy it was, but I didn't feel good about it, my country (Germany) didn't support it, but the EU as a whole did agree to it.

Meanwhile, that article framed it as "Europe is doing a bad thing" and "the West is blah".
Like, man, I doubt, I would agree with my neighbor about this policy, but somehow I'm being generalized into an amorphous blob, the size of half the fucking planet.
It dehumanizes. It makes it seem like we're not open for discussion, despite us internally leading extremely heated discussions.

But of course, we do the exact fucking same. We talk about India collectively all the time, even though it is much larger than the EU, with 1.4 billion different opinions. You don't hear "the East" as often these days, but you do hear "Asia", which is effectively just as meaningless of a word.

And yeah, just seeing the inverse happen to me, made it instantly clear why this is shit, which I would not have even thought about, if I only ever read our news outlets.