USA TODAY International Edition
How a lie took hold and took off
Conspiracy theory about Soros, caravan resonates
This is the life of a lie.
Three weeks ago, a caravan of Hondurans began walking nearly 2,000 miles to the United States. Their ranks grew as they inched north, and, along with them, falsehoods grew, too. But one stands out: a conspiracy theory that liberal billionaire George Soros, a Jewish immigrant, is paying the migrants to make the journey – or even orchestrating it.
Members of Congress and the president’s son repeated it. Conservative celebrities did, too.
It also may have resonated in darker places.
Cesar Sayoc, the man charged with mailing pipe bombs to Soros and other prominent critics of President Donald Trump, dwelled at length online about conspiracy theories involving the Hungarian-American philanthropist. Robert Bowers, charged with killing 11 people worshiping in a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday, used his social media accounts to post extensively about the caravan, including circulating an image of refugees in Guatemala purportedly climbing into a truck with a Star of David on the side.
But it began with a handful of posts in the caravan’s early days.
One of the first was from a North Carolina writer who goes by the screen name “lorettatheprole.” Loretta Malakie has more than 6,000 followers on Twitter, to whom she directs frequent posts about “white genocide,” Jews and the “invading force” approaching the border.
On Oct. 14, Malakie posted a link to an article about the caravan, with a single word of commentary: “Soros.”
That same day, identical posts appeared over the course of 20 minutes in six pro-Trump Facebook groups. Combined, those six groups had 165,000 members. A user who gave the name Philip Balzano, a Trump supporter from Chicago, wrote to the Trump Train group: “Here Comes ANOTHER Group of Paid for New Demoncratic Voters Just in Time for the Primaries... The Financier aka ‘Win at All Costs’ ‘Never Let a Good Crisis Go to
Waste’ the Evil George Soros and His 140+ Orgs, Should Be Classified as Terrorist and Terrorist Orgs.”
Malakie declined to comment, though on Twitter she panned the USA TODAY reporter who called her as “evil.” Balzano did not respond to an interview request sent through Facebook.
“It’s really significant how these memes can go from feverswamp-ish places to be amplified by lawmakers, even the president,” said David Carroll, associate professor at The New School’s Parsons School of Design in New York. “From there, the impact on world events can’t be underestimated.”
USA TODAY followed that path by examining tens of thousands of social media posts on three major mainstream social media sites: Twitter, Facebook and Reddit.
Over the next three days, a few louder social media voices weighed in. By Oct. 16 – four days after the caravan departed – the combined following of accounts mentioning both Soros and the caravan had reached 2 million. (The total includes some duplicates because people follow more than one account.)
It took just one more day for the theory to reach critical mass.
The evening of Oct. 17, a Republican member of Congress posted a video on Twitter of what he said was people in Honduras handing out small sums of money to migrants.
Rep. Matt Gaetz would later concede that he was mistaken about where the video was shot (it was Guatemala). But by then his message had metastasized, spreading far beyond the 153,000 people who follow the north Florida congressman’s tweets.
Conservative commentator Ann Coulter retweeted it to her 2 million followers. So did Sarah Carter, a journalist who’s a frequent guest on Fox News.
The next day, even more influential voices repeated it.
One was the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who retweeted Gaetz’s post to his 3.1 million followers. A spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. declined to comment.
On Twitter alone, at least 43,000 accounts with a combined 127 million followers carried some message linking Soros to the caravan over those two days; most fanning the conspiracy, a few seeking to knock it down.
Ten days after the caravan began in Honduras, police started intercepting what appeared to be pipe bombs – PVC tubes packed with what the FBI later called “energetic material,” wrapped with tape and attached to a clock – that had been sent to Soros and other prominent critics of President Trump.
By the time police found the first of those bombs in Soros’ mailbox in Westchester County, New York, the lie about his involvement with the caravan had been posted by 20,000 more users on Twitter – to a combined audience of 117 million – and more weighed in on Facebook, Reddit and other sites.
By the morning of Oct. 27, the lie had spread to hundreds of millions of users on mainstream social media and found its way to many more on cable news.
That morning, federal prosecutors say, trucker Bowers stormed into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and shot 11 worshipers to death. Online, Bowers left his own trail of grievance and conspiracy.
Using the handle OneDingo on Twitter, Bowers shared anti-Jewish content and criticized Trump. Since January, he has been a regular on Gab, too, where his bio read: “Jews are the children of Satan.” The image on his Gab account referred to a white supremacist meme. His last message read: “Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
And by the next day, he allegedly did.
In the aftermath, as the news media rushed to cover the killings and to explain the internet conspiracies that might have precipitated such a massacre – the lie spread anew.