crisis actor

crisis actor (plural crisis actors)

1. A person employed to portray a disaster victim during emergency drills.
2. A person who secretly acts out a role, such as victim or mourner, as part of a staged depiction of a deadly event, particularly a mass shooting.
   • 2016 June 28, Christopher Mele, “After Orlando Shooting, ‘False Flag’ and ‘Crisis Actor’ Conspiracy Theories Surface”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:

     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.

   • 2022 February 3, 0:44 from the start, in State Department Spokesperson Holds Briefing‎ (television production), spoken by self (Ned Price), United States Department of State, via C-SPAN 2:

     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.

   • 2022 April 25, Elizabeth Williamson, “‘Crisis Actors’? Where Have I Heard That Before?”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:

     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.

3. (politics) A participant in an international crisis.
   • 2000, John A. Vasquez, What Do We Know about War?, Rowman & Littlefield, →ISBN, page 47:

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

   • 2019, Michael Brecher, Crisis And Change In World Politics, Routledge, →ISBN, page 35:

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