Carusone noted that even conservative-oriented media organizations like Fox News or the National Review have some amount of institutional accountability. But independent operators like O’Keefe or Jones can just keep churning out blatantly false stories, disguised as journalism, without any threat of being held to account.

These pseudo-journalistic outlets have been around for a long time, and have already done serious damage. In 2009, O’Keefe faked a story to make it look like members of ACORN, a community organizing group, were enabling sex traffickers. The result was that Congress, with some Democrats shamefully joining in, defunded the group, leading to its collapse.

Daleiden tried a similar stunt in 2015, creating deceptively edited videos and falsely accusing Planned Parenthood of aborting fetuses in order to sell the tissue to medical researchers. That hoax was used by Republicans across the country to justify defunding the reproductive health organization, which was once widely supported by members of both parties.

Most recently, there was the “Pizzagate” controversy, where reams of fake stories accused Hillary Clinton and John Podesta, her former campaign manager of being involved with a child sex ring allegedly run out of a Washington pizzeria. That of course led to a North Carolina man driving all the way to D.C. to “investigate” these claims, and firing a gun in the restaurant.

Now this loose network of fake journalists will be working with and supporting a presidential administration. To make it worse, Trump himself has a long history of disregard for the truth, which has led him to openly embrace and validate these independent propagandists. He has often told his followers that such sites are more trustworthy than those run by actual journalists. Trump has even hired Stephen Bannon, who ran Breitbart for years, as his chief White House strategist, consummating the marriage between the incoming administration and this independent but Trump-friendly propaganda arm.

There’s almost no way this won’t spiral out of control. The election showed that many people, especially conservatives, will read and share all sorts of content, no matter how preposterous it may be, if it upholds their worldview. Now such fake news will be validated and promoted by most powerful elected leader in the world, threatening to tear down the last boundaries between actual information and propagandistic nonsense.