Smear Campaigns, Character Assassination, and the Erosion of Institutional Trust in Modern Information Ecosystems: A Critical Analysis
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| Modern smear campaigns: anonymous digital attacks, sensational media lies, and public slander erode reputations and trust. (📷:empowervmedia) |
Character assassination is defined as the deliberate and systematic destruction of an individual’s reputation or credibility through strategic communicative attacks that target their private lives, values, and core identity. While the human impulse to discredit rivals is as old as the recorded history of the Pharaohs or the Roman Senate, the current decade has introduced a level of scale and precision that has transformed this ancient tactic into a ubiquitous feature of global discourse. In the period spanning 2024 and 2025, the world witnessed a profound convergence of technical capability and social fragmentation, creating a fertile environment for what scholars describe as "reputation politics". This is not merely a byproduct of internet anonymity; it is a calculated method of power struggle that treats words and images as psychological weapons designed to subject victims to public scorn and ridicule.
As a cross-cultural phenomenon, character assassination manifests in every political and social environment, using verbal and non-verbal assaults ranging from historical pamphlets to modern viral social media posts. The objective remains the same: to steer public attention away from substantive debate and toward the alleged personal flaws of an opponent. In the contemporary context, the success of a smear campaign often results in the target being rejected by their professional community or ostracised by their social environment. This form of "social annihilation" can have lifelong consequences, making it a preferred tool for those who seek to silence dissent or delegitimise institutional authority without resorting to physical force.
The Five Pillars of Character Assassination
The effectiveness of a modern smear campaign is rarely the result of chance; rather, it relies on the synchronisation of five specific elements, often referred to as the "pillars" of character assassination. First, the attacker is the individual or group responsible for mounting the assault, often motivated by power struggles, ideological divides, or simple personal gain. In the digital age, these attackers are frequently obscured by anonymity, allowing for "guerrilla" reputation warfare that avoids legal accountability. The second pillar is the target, which can be an individual, a social group, or an entire institution. While politicians are the most visible targets, scientists, athletes, and academics are increasingly finding themselves in the crosshairs of coordinated campaigns.
The third pillar, the media, acts as the channel through which the attack is framed and amplified; it is no longer a passive carrier but a system that can "debunk" or "supercharge" a narrative based on algorithmic priorities. The fourth pillar is the public (the audience that consumes, interprets, and often shares the character attack, driven by their own cognitive biases and social identities). Finally, the context provides the historical, cultural, and political setting that determines whether an attack will resonate. For example, an allegation of "deviant" behaviour may fail in a highly liberalised context but succeed in a community undergoing a moral panic regarding traditional values. These pillars interact in a feedback loop: an attacker crafts a message suited for a specific context, the media amplifies it based on engagement metrics, and a polarised public validates it through social sharing, which in turn emboldens the attacker to launch further assaults.
Typologies of the Modern Smear
The repertoire of the character assassin in 2024 and 2025 has expanded significantly beyond simple name-calling. Scholars have identified several primary methods, including "anonymous lies", "misquoting", "silencing", and the use of "ridicule" as a purposeful distortion in a comical context to portray victims as weak or irrational. A particularly insidious technique is "memory erasing", where attackers attempt to avoid any reference to an individual’s work in an effort to erase their record from collective memory. This is often seen in academic and political contexts where a "disgraced" figure’s contributions are systematically scrubbed from institutional histories.
Furthermore, allegations of mental illness or sexual deviance continue to be effective ploys because of the persistent social stigmas attached to these conditions. In the political sphere, "ideological labelling" uses terms like "communist", "fascist", or "terrorist" as linguistic shortcuts to trigger immediate public repulsion without requiring evidence. These tactics are often organised into "long-term" campaigns that aim to establish a persistent pattern of alleged "deviant" behaviour, ensuring that even if one specific claim is debunked, the general "stink" of the controversy remains. The persistence of these labels is what makes them so dangerous; once an individual is branded as "unstable" or "radical", every subsequent action they take is viewed through that distorted lens, effectively neutralising their ability to participate in public life.
Smear Campaigns in the "Super Election Year"
The year 2024 was dubbed the "super election year", with more than 60 countries, representing over half the world’s population, heading to the polls. This historic democratic exercise coincided with a massive surge in generative artificial intelligence, leading to widespread fears that AI-enhanced disinformation would wreak havoc on election integrity. While the most extreme predictions of a "tech-enabled Armageddon" did not fully materialise in terms of shifting final vote counts, the nature of political smear campaigns was fundamentally altered.
The real impact of AI in the 2024 and 2025 elections was not the creation of one singular "bombshell" deepfake, but rather the "seeding" and "spreading" of low-quality disinformation at an unprecedented scale. AI tools lowered the skill and resource threshold for disinformation, enabling actors to generate convincing deceptions without proficiency in traditional tampering software. For example, in the United States, candidates and their supporters used AI-generated images to portray opponents as dictators or to fabricate celebrity endorsements, such as the widely reported AI-generated image of Taylor Swift appearing to support Donald Trump. These tactics were designed to mobilise the base and create uncertainty among undecided voters, even if the images themselves were eventually debunked.
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The Weaponisation of Uncertainty
As the public became increasingly aware of the power of artificial intelligence, a secondary and perhaps more dangerous phenomenon emerged: the "liar’s dividend". The "liar’s dividend" occurs when public figures exploit heightened awareness of deepfakes to falsely claim that legitimate, incriminating evidence is actually AI-generated. This creates a "win-win" for the unscrupulous actor: if a fake video is believed, the opponent is smeared; if a real video is released, the actor can simply "cry wolf" and dismiss it as a fabrication.
Research involving over 15,000 American adults confirmed that false claims of misinformation ("crying wolf" over fake news) help politicians maintain support among their base after a scandal. This strategy is particularly effective against text-based reports of scandals. While video evidence remains harder to dismiss, the psychological seed of doubt planted by the mere possibility of AI manipulation is often enough to paralyse public consensus. In this environment, when individuals are aware that information might be factually incorrect, they often choose to believe and disseminate it anyway to bolster their preferred candidate. This "destabilisation of reality" fosters an environment where voters default to their partisan affiliations rather than engaging with objective facts, effectively rewarding the liar with a "dividend" of continued political authority.
The Logic of "Cancel Culture"
Beyond the formal political arena, smear campaigns have become a defining feature of social and cultural interactions, often characterised as "cancel culture" or "call-out culture". Cancel culture involves the collective withdrawal of support (social, financial, or professional) from an individual perceived to have violated social norms. While proponents view this as a necessary tool for holding powerful figures accountable, critics argue it has created a "chilling effect" on public discourse and amounts to a form of cyberbullying.
People who are the targets of cancel culture experience severe emotional suffering as a result of cyberbullying, reputational harm, and public humiliation. This fear is not limited to the individual being "cancelled"; it extends to the broader public, fostering a climate of self-censorship. A 2025 report indicated that 63% of journalists have increased their self-censorship, a trend mirrored in general social media behaviour where users avoid "transgressive" topics to prevent backlash. This "vicious cycle" of fear and repression undermines the principles of free speech and open-mindedness that are essential for societal advancement. In many cases, the "punishment" of cancellation is disproportionate to the original act, as the digital environment lacks the due process and proportionality inherent in a functioning legal system.
Academia and the "Safetyism" Trap
Universities, once the bastions of open-mindedness and intellectual rigour, have become primary battlegrounds for reputation politics and "safetyism". Social psychologists argue that "call-out culture" arises on college campuses from a moral culture of "safetyism", where people are unwilling to engage with discourse they interpret as transgressive. This environment has led to a significant increase in deplatforming attempts and successful cancellations of speakers and researchers.
Scholars at Risk documented 395 attacks on higher education communities across 49 countries between July 2024 and June 2025, noting that attacks are spreading even to traditionally democratic countries. In the United States, executive and legislative actions have targeted research and teaching on "disfavoured" topics, leading to the cancellation of grants and the dismissal of faculty. For example, half of conservative faculty members compared to a third of liberal faculty fear reputation costs from colleagues misunderstanding something they have said. This climate of anxiety is not just about personal feelings; it directly impacts the quality of education and research. When researchers avoid controversial but necessary topics to protect their reputations, the "discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge" is placed on life support.
Case Study
A striking example of institutional reputation politics occurred in Australia in 2024 and 2025. The University of Melbourne faced intense criticism for using Wi-Fi location data to identify and discipline 22 students who participated in a pro-Palestine protest in May 2024. This use of surveillance data for purposes that students "could not have reasonably expected" was found to be a violation of privacy norms and set a dangerous precedent for academic freedom.
The university’s actions, which included reviewing the email accounts of staff members and expelling students in June 2025, were condemned as "digital repression" that nullifies the potential impact of protest on policy change. This case highlights how institutional "reputation management" can quickly transition into a smear campaign against its own students and faculty, using administrative data as a weapon of character assassination. When a university prioritises its corporate "mission and values" over the fundamental rights of its community to dissent, it chips away at the foundations of a free society and degrades the quality of campus discourse.
The Psychological Mechanics of the Smear
Why are smear campaigns so effective, even when the information they present is demonstrably false? The answer lies in the fundamental architecture of human cognition. The "illusory truth effect" is a robust psychological phenomenon where repeated exposure to a statement increases its perceived accuracy, regardless of its factual correctness. This occurs because repetition enhances "processing fluency" (the ease with which our brains process a statement). We often mistake this ease for truthfulness.
Recent research has shown that even highly implausible statements become more plausible with enough repetition, and the illusory truth effect persists even when participants "know better" or have prior knowledge that contradicts the lie. In an age of algorithmic amplification, where the same derogatory claim can appear in a user's feed multiple times from different "sources", the brain is effectively "tricked" into accepting the smear as fact. This effect is exacerbated when users are multi-tasking or cognitively overloaded, as they lack the resources to engage in the "accuracy-focused processing" required to debunk the fluency-based bias. This cognitive vulnerability is the engine that drives the spread of misinformation, turning a single lie into a "viral truth" through the simple mechanism of repetition.
Social Identity Theory and Online Tribalism
The psychological effectiveness of smear campaigns is further amplified by our innate tribalism. Social Identity Theory (SIT) posits that individuals derive part of their self-concept from their membership in social groups, leading to "in-group favouritism" and "out-group discrimination". In the political and social context, this means we adopted the identity of our political group and internalised its norms, making compromise and dialogue increasingly difficult.
When we perceive a threat to our political group, our responses become more extreme, often manifesting as hostility toward out-group members. Smear campaigns exploit this by using vilification as a strategy to demonise adversaries. Rival groups use exaggerated and inflammatory language (such as "genocide", "traitor", or "human slaughter" (to cast opponents in a negative light and incite emotions among supporters). Because attacking an out-group member serves to bolster the status and self-esteem of our own in-group, the public often participates in smears not because they have proof, but because it feels "right" within their social identity framework. This "affective polarisation" ensures that any challenge to a group’s beliefs is perceived as a personal attack, making the smear campaign an effective tool for maintaining group cohesion at the cost of social peace.
Media Systems and the Algorithm
The shift from broadcast-centric media to an algorithmically mediated public sphere has fundamentally changed how character assassination is executed. Social media algorithms, optimised primarily for engagement metrics like clicks, likes, and comments, seldom privilege content according to journalistic significance or professional editorial judgement. Instead, they reconfigure gatekeeping to favour "shareworthiness" (which in practice means content that is sensational, emotionally resonant, and polarising).
Algorithmic curation systematically privileges content that maximises engagement, which historically has been content that makes people angry. This creates a feedback loop where toxic narratives are boosted because they generate "meaningful social interactions" (highly commented posts), even if those interactions are overwhelmingly negative or divisive. For newsrooms, this has led to a "metric-driven visibility logic" that induces self-censorship and pressures journalists to chase virality over investigative depth. The result is an environment where a smear campaign can go from a single post to a global narrative in hours, as the algorithm rewards the "outrage" it generates, regardless of the veracity of the claim.
Platform Fragmentation and the Rise of the Influencer
As legacy media brands lose their grip on the public's attention, the media landscape has fragmented into a multi-platform ecosystem led by influencers and podcasters. The 2025 Digital News Report highlights that engagement with traditional TV and print is falling, while dependence on social video platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram is growing. In many countries, more people now prefer watching the news to reading it, which has supercharged the influence of personality-led creators.
Influencers like Joe Rogan in the United States or Hugo Travers in France reach significant portions of the young population, shaping public debate in ways that legacy media can no longer control. While these creators offer an alternative to institutional news, they are also viewed as primary sources of misleading information. Audiences remain sceptical of AI in news, expecting it to make the information environment less trustworthy, yet they increasingly consume news via AI-driven aggregators like Google Discover and TikTok. This fragmentation makes it harder to "debunk" a smear campaign once it has taken root in a specific influencer’s ecosystem, as the followers of that creator often view institutional fact-checks with suspicion or outright hostility.
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Information Integrity in Australia
The Australian information environment in 2025 provides a critical case study in the fight against smear campaigns. Ahead of the 2025 federal election, the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) warned that the greatest threats to information integrity were domestic, coming from "sovereign citizens, conspiracy theorists, and keyboard warriors". These actors used social media to "stir the pot" and cause problems, often remaining anonymous while spreading disinformation.
The AEC launched a "Disinformation Register" to track and correct viral smears, such as the false claim that 6 million ballot papers went missing. This particular smear originated on Facebook and made erroneous assumptions about voter turnout to suggest "vote rigging". Other common disinformation tactics included promoting a fake formula for casting a "Vote of No Confidence" to trigger a new election, a claim that has no basis in law but remains persistent across multiple election cycles. The AEC’s proactive approach (combining a disinformation register with voter education on "deepfakes" and AI) represents a significant effort to maintain the "manual integrity" of the Australian electoral system against digital threats.
Defamation Law Reform
Australia’s legal response to the rise of digital smears has culminated in the "Stage 2 Defamation Reforms". These reforms focus on the liability of "digital intermediaries" (social media platforms, search engines, and forum hosts) for defamatory content posted by third parties. The goal is to address the fallout from the high-profile Voller case, where media companies were held liable for comments left by third parties on their Facebook pages.
Under the new Stage 2 reforms, digital intermediaries will have an "innocent dissemination defence" if they have an accessible complaints mechanism and take "reasonable access prevention steps" within seven days of receiving a complaint. This shift recognises that intermediaries should not be treated as the primary publishers of everything on their platforms if they act quickly to remove harmful content. However, critics warn that this "seven-day rule" could lead to "excessive removal" of content, as platforms may choose to delete any reported post to maintain their legal immunity, effectively chilling free expression and anonymous online discourse. Furthermore, the lack of uniformity across Australian states has created a "deformation" of the law, where the same post might be legally protected in New South Wales but actionable in Queensland.
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Countering Smear Campaigns
Given the psychological and technical power of modern smear campaigns, the response must be equally sophisticated and grounded in research. The first step toward combating misinformation is "pre-bunking", or warning your audience about suspect sources and reasoning before they encounter the misinformation. This technique, also known as psychological inoculation, prepares the community to have a more critical eye toward deceptive tactics and the types of smears they can expect to see.
When a smear must be addressed, communication experts recommend the "truth sandwich": start with the truth, briefly acknowledge that some are spreading misinformation (without repeating the lie if possible), and then return to the truth. This avoids the "backfire effect" where repeating a myth accidentally reinforces it in the public’s memory. Furthermore, using "plain language" and "narrative visualisations" can help bridge the trust gap, especially among marginalised communities that may have historical reasons to distrust institutional voices. Finally, encouraging an "accuracy focus" during information consumption (asking users to judge the truthfulness of content as they read it) can significantly reduce the power of the illusory truth effect.
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| Public accusation and collective blame: hallmarks of modern character assassination in smear campaigns. (📷:relationships-guiding) |
The analysis of smear campaigns in 2024 and 2025 reveals a landscape where the ancient art of character assassination has been supercharged by the most advanced technologies of the 21st century. We see a world where the "liar’s dividend" protects the powerful, where algorithms reward outrage over evidence, and where "cancel culture" fosters a pervasive anxiety that stifles intellectual discovery. This is not merely a technical problem; it is a systemic crisis of trust and social cohesion.
However, the research also points toward a path of resilience. By understanding the "five pillars" of character assassination and the psychological vulnerabilities that make us susceptible to smears, we can develop better tools for defence. This includes not only legislative reforms like Australia’s Stage 2 defamation laws but also a commitment to media literacy and the use of evidence-based communication strategies like pre-bunking. As the UNESCO flagship report warns, "freedom of expression and information is the very condition for lasting peace". Protecting this freedom in an age of algorithmic vitriol requires a collective effort to value accuracy over fluency and to recognise that the destruction of a reputation is a wound to the entire body politic.
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