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The accusation that the students are paid "crisis actors" has gained the most velocity online, trending on YouTube at one point and racking up tens of thousands of shares on Facebook. The spread of disinformation comes as Silicon Valley faces increasing pressure to crack down on propaganda and fake news.

"In the conspiracist mindset, everything is potentially a deception," David Carroll, an associate professor of media design at The New School, said in an email. "And a supposed secret cabal that orchestrates the liberal conspiracy against the American right-wing would have to involve paid actors, who allegedly appear at staged school massacres, as an elaborate hoax performance to justify gun confiscation."

As of 6 p.m. ET Tuesday, more than 111,000 Facebook users had shared a since-deleted post claiming the Parkland students were performers who exploit tragedies. The post, along with others that had tens of thousands of shares, was later taken down.

In the post, the Facebook user included a screenshot of David Hogg, a 17-year-old Parkland survivor, from an August 2017 television news report that aired on CBS Los Angeles. He had been interviewed by a news crew about a confrontation between a lifeguard and a surfer in Redondo Beach, California. The Facebook user wrote that Hogg, who has said he was visiting Los Angeles at the time of the report, was "pretending."

YouTube also served as a platform for attacks on students, particularly Hogg. As of Wednesday morning, videos alleging he was a crisis actor dominated the YouTube search results for his name. One such video was the top trending clip on the platform early Wednesday morning.

A YouTube spokesperson confirmed the situation and acknowledged that the video had been erroneously added to its Trending section.

"This video should never have appeared in Trending," a YouTube spokesperson wrote in an email. "Because the video contained footage from an authoritative news source, our system misclassified it. As soon as we became aware of the video, we removed it from Trending and from YouTube for violating our policies. We are working to improve our systems moving forward."

Facebook also took action to remove the posts.

"Images that attack the victims of last week's tragedy in Florida are abhorrent," Mary deBree, head of content policy at Facebook, said in an email. "We are removing this content from Facebook."

A national issue

Inflammatory claims like these now accompany just about every major American tragedy. Alex Jones, the controversial conspiracy theorist and Infowars host, suggested on his radio show that the Parkland shooting was a "false flag," or staged, operation. Jones has pushed similar views about the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, including the idea that the people shown in news reports from the scene were actors.

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How the fake "crisis actors" conspiracy took off on social media after Florida school shooting

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The accusation that the students are paid "crisis actors" has gained the most velocity online, trending on YouTube at one point and racking up tens of thousands of shares on Facebook. The spread of disinformation comes as Silicon Valley faces increasing pressure to crack down on propaganda and fake news.