Investor and philanthropist George Soros is being accused of orchestrating and funding protests in the US over the deaths of black people in confrontations with police, with accusations that he hires protesters and rents buses to transport them, or has people stash piles of bricks to be hurled into glass storefronts or at police.
Online posts about Soros have skyrocketed in the past few weeks. They have been accompanied by online ads that call on authorities to “investigate George Soros for funding domestic terrorism and his decades-long corruption.”
Soros, 89, has donated billions of dollars of his wealth to liberal and anti-authoritarian causes around the world. The Hungarian-American, who is Jewish, has also been the subject of anti-Semitic attacks and conspiracy theories for decades.
Photo: AFP
Over just four days late last month, negative Twitter posts about Soros spiked from about 20,000 a day to more than 500,000 a day, according to an analysis by the Anti-Defamation League.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London think tank focused on extremism and polarization, also found a pronounced jump on Facebook, where there were 68,746 mentions of Soros last month. The previous record of 38,326 Soros mentions was in October 2018, when posts alleged he was helping migrant caravans headed to the US.
The new wave began as nationwide demonstrations emerged over George Floyd’s death while in the custody of police in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Some people say that Soros financed the protests, while others say he colluded with police to fake Floyd’s death last month.
“I think partly it’s an attempt to distract from the real matters at hand — the [COVID-19] pandemic, the protests or the Black Lives Matter movement,” Laura Silber, chief communications officer for Soros’ philanthropic Open Society Foundations, said of the theories. “It’s pretty demeaning to the people out there protesting when someone says they’re all paid. It’s insulting.”
Experts who study conspiracy theories say that the new claims are a way to delegitimize the protests and the actual reasons behind them. Some see anti-Semitism, or a new spin on the age-old hoax that a shadowy cabal of rich men — whether it is the Illuminati, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Microsoft founder Bill Gates or Soros — is manipulating world events.
The theories have had real-world consequences. In 2018, amid news of caravans of migrants making their way toward the US-Mexico border, online misinformation about Soros was linked to violence. Cesar Sayoc, a Florida man, mentioned Soros dozens of times on social media before mailing pipe bombs to newsrooms, top Democrats and Soros himself.
Some Republicans have begun pushing back on false claims of Soros’ connection to the protests and those spreading the rumors.
After several Republican chairpeople in a Texas county shared posts claiming Soros was behind the demonstrations, the state party leader called on them to resign.
Experts say conspiracy theories can become a problem when they lead to threats of violence or cause people to lose trust in important institutions. They can fade into the background only to re-emerge at times of crisis.
“Conspiracy theories are like themselves viruses,” said Josh Introne, a Syracuse University information studies professor who researches conspiracy theories. “The characters may change a little, and the theory itself may mutate, but they stick around.”
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