Soros organizes stashing piles of bricks near protests. The original photo showed two unmarked buses someone later doctored it to add the language supposedly implicating Soros. The photo was cited as proof of Soros’ involvement in the protests, but it was bogus. Last week, a photo claiming to show two buses emblazoned with the words “Soros Riot Dance Squad” got widespread attention.
It’s a new take on an old hoax: past versions claimed Soros paid for a long list of other events, including the 2017 Women’s March held just after President Donald Trump's inauguration. No evidence has been presented to suggest demonstrators were paid by Soros or his organizations. “It’s pretty demeaning to the people out there protesting when someone says they’re all paid. “I think partly it’s an attempt to distract from the real matters at hand - the pandemic, the protests or the Black Lives Matter movement,” Laura Silber, chief communications officer for Soros’ philanthropic Open Society Foundations, said of the theories. But all available evidence suggests the protests are what they seem: gatherings of thousands of Americans upset about police brutality and racial injustice. Some insist Soros financed the protests, while others say he colluded with police to fake Floyd's death last month. The new wave began as nationwide demonstrations emerged over George Floyd's death at the hands of Minneapolis police.
The previous record of 38,326 Soros mentions was in October 2018, when angry posts alleged he was helping migrant caravans headed to the U.S. 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 in May. 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. Such hoaxes can now travel farther and faster with social media. What Comes Next in New York's Investigation of Donald Trump