The victims in the shooting? They were “crisis actors” hired to promote the story as a pretext to impose tighter gun restrictions, the theory goes.

One possible option the Russians are considering, and which we [the United States Department of State] made public today, involves the production of a propaganda video. A video with graphic scenes of false explosions, depicting corp-, corpses, crisis actors pretending to be mourners and images of destroyed locations or military equipment.

Moscow’s ambassador to the United Nations dismissed Associated Press photographs of the aftermath as “fake news,” and the Foreign Ministry alleged that bloodied, pregnant women evacuated from the rubble were crisis actors.

Finally, the greater the proportion of nondemocracies among crisis actors, the more likely it becomes that escalation will occur.

Cases with minimal crisis actor participation are found in most regions of the global system.

Crisis actor

Meaning

Noun