Although the phrase “fake news” itself is a used as a magic wand to dismiss uncomfortable facts, this can and does happen.
Sounds like you've come up with a business plan even more harmful than Facebook.
When I did some volunteer work with a Progressive organization I found out that there's an underground of people who do exactly this work. Their archives are private, though, and I can't speak to their vetting process. When I learned about it the only thing I could say was, "This sounds like professionalized character assassination."
While I was developing my @sfships Twitter bot, I needed to look up a ton of locodes, 5-character codes for "economically significant" places. The agency in charge of them releases it as CSV and Microsoft Access files, so it's a pain to quickly access the data. I said, "fuck this" and turned it into a website. E.g.:
On a lark, I put some Google Ads on it; a few times a year Google sends me $100. More than enough to pay for the site itself. Given that I haven't touched it in a few years that's good enough for me.
These companies do exist; I tried to google but came up empty, but I've heard that there are companies that keep collections of dirt on people like politicians, that can be released at strategic times (e.g. before elections). It's likely the various 'secret' services around the world have similar caches, like this rumour that the Kremlin had 'kompromat' on Trump (camera footage of prostitutes pissing on him or something), threatening to release it if he didn't do as they told him. I mean nothing came of that, as far as we know, so it might've just been propaganda, but it sounds plausible enough - both that Trump would be doing that, and that the KGB or whatever it is these days would have cameras in dignitaries' hotel rooms.
He's paid off & NDA'ed a few known people, it's possible that not everyone he's done that with bothered to come forward once he was president. He may appear indiscreet merely because his efforts failed in two cases but not in others. Those two failures show that he was making significant efforts to keep this sort of thing discreet.
This is by no means intended as an argument that additional incidents like this took place, only the observation that claiming something that already has precedent didn't happen again because "evidence would have shown up" is flawed justification.
The genius of Trump is that he’s able to normalize it. He had scandals every week that would take down most people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormy_Daniels–Donald_Trump_sc...
[0] sex worker in this case being porn actress not AFAIK a prostitute; I don’t know which of “porn star” or “prostitute” would’ve been more damaging in the view of Trump’s advisers with regard to his expected electoral result at the time, as American cultural attitudes to sexuality are basically alien to me.
Maybe his core would say “that’s fake, but even if it’s real, then hey, what he’s into, he’s into - people can do weird stuff”. But actually seeing the video of someone peeing on the president of the United States is humiliating for the party and the country, and would (maybe?) be enough to have him sidelined.
They could argue “respect the office, not the person”, but the counter would quickly be “if a person doesn’t have enough respect to not be peed on by another human being, then maybe they shouldn’t hold the office”.
I mean - it would just be replayed over and over and the Streisand effect would take hold. Any pro-trump person would probably have to wade through replies with links of him being urinated on. Quickly jokes would come up about him taking crap, it’d be thrown into debates. Chants would be made… the little decal of the guy peeing on stuff would quickly be put over trump name or campaign stickers.
A "reputation archive" company that keeps vouched copies of potentially harmful dirt on "the powerful", available on demand. Sure you can do opposition research to dig up things, but why go through that effort when you can simply wait passively and harvest later?