“How do you know when it’s a staged event?” reads the text in a March 13 Facebook post. “When CNN’s Barbara Starr is on the scene as a witness crisis actor.”
The post shows an image of Starr, a former CNN correspondent who is now a senior fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy, alongside four other images of women. The images are labeled “Sandy Hook,” “Boston,” “Watertown” and “San Bernardino.”
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
(Screenshot from Facebook)
We tried to reach Starr at the Annenberg Center and were unsuccessful. CNN did not comment on the post.
We identified one of the people in the other photos in the post, and we found no evidence that the photos show Starr — or prove the crimes cited in the post were staged.
The woman in the image labeled “Sandy Hook” is identified in a YouTube video as Victoria Munoz, a friend of the mother of the shooter in the 2012 attack that left 26 children and staff members dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
We’ve previously debunked false flag and crisis actor claims about the Sandy Hook shooting and the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.
Plus, Starr was busy contributing to CNN’s coverage of two of these incidents: the Boston Marathon bombing and the 2015 fatal mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.
False flag conspiracies aren’t new and Facebook is among the biggest sources of mass shooting misinformation.
We count this post among those peddling falsehoods. Pants on Fire!
PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.