Thomas Rid, a professor of security studies at King’s College London, wrote on Twitter that disinformation campaigns have “often deliberately blended accurate and forged details” to sow distrust and confusion.

If the news media and public figures publicize lies, they lose their credibility as trustworthy sources of information. “There’s no reliable truth to rest upon,” Professor Pearce said. “Every piece of information you get is ‘possibly true, possibly false.’”

Degrading that trust can be deeply damaging. While in Russia in 2015, I was struck by how many of the people I met saw the world through a lens that I began to call the “prudent hypothetical.” They reacted to all information, whether from official sources or thirdhand rumors, as if it might be true. I came to realize that it was a self-protective impulse, a way to prepare for any potential outcome in an unpredictable, unreliable world.

But they were also careful not to rely on that information, lest it turn out to be a fabrication. They trusted only the facts they had verified themselves, and only the people to whom they had close personal ties.

I had seen the same thing in Guatemala several years earlier. There, spreading lies and salacious gossip to discredit one’s enemies is referred to as a “campaña negra,” or a black campaign, rather than kompromat. But the result was the same: Public trust had been so eroded that lies were equally capable of destroying the honest and rehabilitating the criminal.

When it appeared that Yasmín Barrios, the judge presiding over the trial of Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemala’s former dictator, might convict him of genocide and crimes against humanity in 2013, a campaign of coordinated leaks and rumors portrayed her as a corrupt agent of foreign governments, willing to discredit her country in exchange for personal gain. Leaks and rumors attacked Judge Barrios personally, but by extension, they also undermined the credibility of the justice system in which she worked.

For example, the news media reported that the judge had been seen dining with “foreign women” at a restaurant in Guatemala City, and suggested that this was evidence of foreign influence on her rulings. In fact, the “foreigners” were Judge Barrios’s Guatemalan mother, her neighbor, and a nun who was a friend of the family. But the rumors had their desired effect: They discredited not only Judge Barrios but also the genocide trial.