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.”
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to visit Canada next week, his first since relations plummeted after the assassination of a Canadian Sikh separatist in Vancouver, triggering diplomatic expulsions and hitting trade. Analysts hope it is a step toward repairing ties that soured in 2023, after then-Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau pointed the finger at New Delhi’s involvement in murdering Hardeep Singh Nijjar, claims India furiously denied. An invitation extended by new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to Modi to attend the G7 leaders summit in Canada offers a chance to “reset” relations, former Indian diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla said. “This is a
RSS