Businessman and philanthropist George Soros is once again at the center of a yet another piece of misinformation. This time it says he was arrested on in Philadelphia for "election interference."
YourNewsWire.com, a right-wing website, claimed on Monday that law enforcement authorities in Philadelphia arrested Soros and a judge ordered a "publication ban" on his arrest. The article noted that the ban excluded non-American media houses from reporting the ruling.
"The indictment lists only on the criminal activity Soros participated in prior to the November election, such as wire fraud, identity theft, aiding and abetting, and damage to computers.," the article claimed. "The FBI stated that the indictment will likely be updated to reflect election interference charges in relation to Dominion Voting, once the full scale of Soros' operations has been exposed. Soros is currently being interrogated by the FBI."
The website backed up its claims by attaching a copy of the indictment. However, according to fact-checking website PolitiFact, the indictment was from Oct. 15 that detailed six Russians who were allegedly involved in multiple high-profile cyber-attacks. The article forged the indictment to include Soros' name. So, neither the indictment nor the claim of Soros' arrest is true.
Meanwhile, Dominion Voting Systems — a company that sells voting machines and tabulators to over 30 American states — has also been attacked by the right-wing who claim that it manipulated votes in favor of President-elect Joe Biden. The conspiracy theory was also propagated by President Donald Trump. However, the company dismissed the claims and maintained that it was non-partisan.
Soros, who is well known for supporting liberal causes, attracted considerable attention from right-wing conspiracy theorists ahead of the Nov. 3 presidential elections in the U.S. During the recent Black Lives Matter protests in the country, conspiracy theorists photoshopped his pictures to claim that he paid protesters and provided them with logistical support. However, none of those claims was found to be true.
Earlier this year, Soros criticized President Donald Trump at the Worked Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He described Trump as "a con man and the ultimate narcissist."
"[Trump] wants the world to revolve around him. When his fantasy of becoming president came true, his narcissism developed a pathological dimension," he said at the time.
