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

Law enforcement officials have in recent years warned of an uptick in online sextortion scams, in which bad actors, typically located overseas, target children and teens, often with profiles that appear to belong to friendly fellow teenagers. —Clare Duffy, CNN, 25 June 2024

Many have claimed only bad actors raise rents far above the caps, except in circumstances when buildings are facing substantial costs to do things like replace roofs and upgrade infrastructure. —Katie Shepherd, Washington Post, 24 June 2024

There will always be bad actors who want to wield new technology in a manner that may not respect the intellectual property or data privacy rights of customers or the public. —Amanda Gerut, Fortune, 20 June 2024

No industry in America had such far-going protections — despite stacks of reports that Snapchat, Meta, et al. were enabling bad actors to commit harms against young users. —Paul Solotaroff, Rolling Stone, 17 June 2024

Word History

First Known Use

1879, in the meaning defined above