After Orlando Shooting, ‘False Flag’ and ‘Crisis Actor’ Conspiracy Theories Surface

After the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., on June 12, Twitter brimmed with news reports of the carnage. But some posts on the massacre that claimed 49 lives also included a curious phrase: “false flag.”

It was a code used by conspiracy theorists to signal their belief that the government had staged the massacre and the information the public was reading and hearing from the mainstream media was untrue.

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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.

It is easy to dismiss such beliefs as preposterous and to think of them as coming from a paranoid fringe of society that deeply distrusts the government, but such theories are pervasive. It is difficult to gauge how many people believe these stories, but a general search of YouTube for false-flag videos brought up more than 700,000 results.

The term false flag relates to naval warfare when a ship would fly a flag that would conceal its true identity as a way to lure an enemy closer. Today, it is commonly a shorthand for an act of deception.

Conspiracy theorists have applied the label to high-profile attacks, including the shootings by a husband and wife last year in San Bernardino, Calif., that killed 14; the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012 that left 26 dead; and the attack at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., in 2007 that killed 33.

The phrase has even been used to doubt the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Jesse Walker, the author of “The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory,” said fear, the human need to find patterns and tell stories, and the recognition that conspiracies are not impossible help fuel such theories. The stories — no matter how outlandish — can bring meaning and a measure of comfort in a world that can make no sense, he said.