Pete Buttigieg, the latest victim of an internet smear.
Pete Buttigieg, not the first victim of an internet smear and certainly not the last. Scott Olson / Getty Images

For decades upon decades in recent American history, if you wanted to mislead a vast audience with a false smear against someone, you needed to get that smear past certain mass media "gatekeepers"—people like radio show producers, television network editors, and reporters at mass circulation dailies like the New York Times and the Washington Post. By and large, these were skeptical folks who considered it their job to promote only verifiable facts.

It's a big mistake to be overly nostalgic for this bygone era. It produced its own false storylines and it featured, as its gatekeepers, mostly white men. But it's important to be clear-eyed about how dead and gone that era is today, and CNN has done a service for our gatekeeper-free internet era by examining the architecture of last week's very modern online smear campaign against Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg.

Pay attention, because the formula used against Buttigieg has been used to great effect before and is sure to be used again, especially as the 2020 elections get closer. Here's how it works:

Start with a digital "platform" that lives on free, user-generated content and legally defines itself not as a publisher, but rather as a fancy online message board.

Such a platform views its primary job as helping people share their thoughts as widely as possible, as quickly as possible. It doesn't want to be a gatekeeper with a responsibility to consider the relative value of information before it's posted. In the Buttigieg case, Twitter and Medium were the digital platforms of choice for releasing a false smear that alleged Buttigieg had sexually assaulted a young college Republican not too long ago.

Next, get the smear picked up by news outlets or, better, a bunch of quasi-news outlets that make up an ideological echo chamber. The Buttigieg smear, as CNN reports, quickly moved on from Medium and Twitter and "ricocheted around the right-wing internet, thanks to sites like Big League Politics, InfoWars, NewsWars and The Gateway Pundit, potentially reaching millions of readers."

From there, the smear can either make another leap to so-called "mainstream media" publications that carry a bit more credibility and reach an ideologically wider audience, or it can just ferment over a long period of time in certain chatrooms and Facebook feeds until it creates an alternate reality believed by a certain number of Americans (ala Pizzagate). Either way, the smear succeeds.

Or, the smear can be swiftly debunked by real journalists and removed from the original platform where it was posted, as the Buttigieg smear was. Note that this last option doesn't fully erase the smear, because nothing ever fully disappears on the internet and in any case, writing a story that debunks a smear generally requires explaining what the smear was in the first place.

Ultimately, if a smear gets going the best one can currently hope for is what happened with Buttigieg and the false allegation of sexual assault.

"Now," CNN notes, "when someone searches for information about the allegation on Google, stories debunking the smear show up before the smear itself — a small victory for Buttigieg and for the truth."

Note, though, that the people who did the labor of debunking the Buttigieg smear were not employed by the digital platforms that launched the smear in the first place, but by real journalists, people working in an industry that has been decimated by the rise of digital platforms.

Note, too, that in the absence of old-school media "gatekeepers," and with digital platforms declining to perform the gatekeeping function once performed by old-school publishers, false smears are going to keep on running out of the gate, especially as the 2020 elections get closer.

One way to maybe slow them down: learn the False Smear Formula, and be skeptical when you see it taking shape.