bad actor

noun

plural bad actors

: a person, group, country, etc. who purposely and usually repeatedly engages in very bad behavior (such as committing crimes or causing harm to others)

Giving users a way to prove that they're being harassed with, say, a screenshot or some other form of authentication could help Twitter catch bad actors, even after they've covered their tracks.

—Issie Lapowsky

A perennial diplomatic bad actor, North Korea has already rattled its sabers at the opening of the Obama administration.

—Alex Kingsbury

"We've got to break away from the notion," as the U.A.W.'s [United Auto Workers] director of public relations, Peter G. Laarman, puts it, "that labor is a 'bad actor' in the economy. …"

—Harry Stein

also : something that causes trouble, danger, or a problem

The bad actor in male pattern hair loss is DHT, a metabolic product of testosterone.

—Jane E. Brody

We have special ducts throughout the vapor bath that carry away all the toxic bad actors.

—PC Today

Examples of bad actor in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

But the history of the Middle East has demonstrated that the demise of a bad actor is not sufficient to produce better ones. —Arash Azizi, The Atlantic, 17 Dec. 2024

CrowdTangle This tool, which Facebook acquired in 2016, allowed publishers to track high-performing social media posts but also helped researchers and fact-checkers monitor bad actors on Facebook Pages, Groups, Instagram accounts, and—before API access was restricted—Twitter/X and Reddit. —Chloe Albanesius, PCMAG, 16 Dec. 2024

Israel reportedly struck 500 Syrian military targets since Assad's overthrow in what Israeli officials say is a campaign to ensure strategic weapons systems don't end up in the hands of bad actors. —Gordon G. Chang, Newsweek, 11 Dec. 2024

Anyone putting their money down at a casino, particularly higher up the stakes spectrum, should at least be aware of the risk of bad actors—particularly in a game like poker, where your opponents are other patrons rather than the casino itself. —Ben Dowsett, WIRED, 10 Dec. 2024

Word History

First Known Use

1879, in the meaning defined above