They say he hires protesters and rents buses to transport them. Some say he has people stash piles of bricks to be hurled into glass storefronts or at police.
George Soros, the billionaire investor and philanthropist who has long been a target of conspiracy theories, is now being falsely accused of orchestrating and funding the protests over police killings of Black people that have roiled the United States. Amplified by a growing number of people on the far right, including some Republican leaders, online posts about Soros have skyrocketed in recent weeks.
They have been accompanied by online ads bought by conservative groups 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 personal wealth to liberal and anti-authoritarian causes around the world, making him a favoured target among many on the right. The Hungarian-American, who is Jewish, has also been the subject of anti-Semitic attacks and conspiracy theories for decades.
Such hoaxes can now travel farther and faster with social media.
Over just four days in late May, 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 polarisation, found an even more pronounced jump on Facebook, where there were 68,746 mentions of Soros in May. The previous record of 38,326 Soros mentions was in October 2018, when angry posts alleged he was helping migrant caravans headed to the US.
Read the article by David Klepper and Lori Hinnant in The Sydney Morning Herald.