Some articles popped on social media bearing claiming that President Rodrigo Duterte warned American business magnate, investor and philanthropist George Soros that he has a bounty on his head in the Philippines.
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The article was shared by Facebook users Sean Adl-Tabatabai and Baxter Dmitry. Their Adl-Tabatabai even shared the article to the Facebook group “President Rody Duterte-Feederal Movement International.” Both users’ posts gained hundreds of shares.
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We even found who seemed to be a Thai Facebook user who shared the story, too.
We later found out that both Ald-Tabatabai and Dmitry were connected to the main blog that carried the story, yournewswire.com.
According to yournewswire.com, Soros cancelled his ‘humanitarian visit’ to the Philippines after getting a warning from President Duterte about a ‘bounty’ on his head in the country.
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Dated May 6, the article further claimed that Duterte fired a warning at Soros a week after the House of Representatives approved the proposal for the reinstatement of the death penalty. The President allegedly told Soros: “There is a special place in hell for you, idiot. Set one foot in this country and my duty is to make you go straight there.”
Yournewswire.com also said that Duterte and Soros have been engaged in a war of words for years, as Duterte accused Soros of destabilizing Asian democracies and financing editorial pieces against him. The Philippine president hit the Human Rights Watch for getting a $100 million grant from Soros.
While it is true that President Duterte did point to the Americans and the Soros-funded HRW for attacking him with daily editorials in November 2016, we found several errors and unverified statements in yournewswire.com’s story.
First, the House approved the death penalty bill on its third and final reading last March 8, so the May 6 article was wrong in claiming that the approval of the bill happened the previous week before the article was published.
Second, we couldn’t find any article about Soros’ supposed “humanitarian visit” to the Philippines, so it is likely another error, a deliberate one, on the part of yournewswire.com.
Third, the article’s claim about Duterte and Soros’ war of words that lasted for years is untrue. Duterte rose to the presidency on June 30, 2016 and it was only in November 2016 when he pointed to Soros and Fil-Am civic leader Loida Nicolas-Lewis as two of the people behind the plans to oust him and attack him through editorial pieces. Soros didn’t respond to Duterte at all, so it cannot qualify for a “war of words” that occurred for years.
Fourth, we could not find other credible media sites carrying the story about Duterte’s supposed warning to Soros about a bounty on his head. We only found it published on yournewswire.com and the other blogs that copied the story from the said website.
Meme Buster researched more about yournewswire.com and found several articles from the hoax-busting website snopes.com debunking the fake stories and hoaxes published by yournewswire.com. Snopes debunked the stories from yournewswire.com, such as Bernie Sanders Suggests Election Is Rigged, Unendorses Hillary Clinton and Russia Has Amassed Troops to Surround the U.S. Borders.
We also found yournewswire.com as one of the websites noted to be fake by CBS News in its article, “Don’t get fooled by these fake news sites.”
No wonder the website was quite careless in making its claims about Duterte giving a warning about a bounty on Soros’ head. It’s clear now that yournewswire.com cannot be trusted for having published several fake stories before.
Sources: ( rappler.com , politics.com.ph , philstar.com , reuters.com , snopes.com , cbsnews.com )
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