George Soros says President Trump is conspiring with Facebook to get reelected

FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images

George Soros delivers a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 24, 2019.

• Well-known liberal billionaire George Soros said he believes Facebook will work with Trump to get the president re-elected, as first reported by Bloomberg.
• Speaking at Davos on Thursday, Soros said he thinks there's an "informal mutual assistance operation developing between Trump and Facebook."
• "This is just plain wrong," a Facebook spokesperson told Business Insider.
• Soros has repeatedly used the World Economic Forum at Davos as a platform to criticize Facebook, and following his 2018 remarks, the company responded by secretly hiring a company to run a smear campaign against Soros.

• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Billionaire George Soros - well-known for his sizable donations to liberal political causes - said Thursday that he believes that Facebook and President Donald Trump are conspiring ahead of this year's presidential election.

"Facebook will work together to re-elect Trump, and Trump will work to protect Facebook," he said, as first reported by Bloomberg.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Soros said he thinks there's an "informal mutual assistance operation or agreement developing between Trump and Facebook," though he did not offer any evidence to back up his claim.

"This is just plain wrong," a Facebook spokesperson told Business Insider.

Soros also said there's "nothing to stop" Facebook from spreading misinformation and that he's "very concerned" about the 2020 elections. Soros has often been vilified by the political right for his ties to liberal causes - indeed, at this year's event, he also described Trump as a "a conman and a narcissist," the BBC reports.

This is not the first time Soros has used the event in Davos to criticize Facebook. In 2018, he argued that the tech giant's size and "monopolistic" behavior had made it a "menace" to society, damaged democracy, and encouraged "addiction" akin to gambling companies.

The New York Times reported later that year that, following Soros' remarks, Facebook had hired a Republican-linked opposition research firm called Definers Public Affairs, to dig up dirt on Soros and push negative press about him.

Following the report, Facebook cut ties with Definers. Elliot Schrage, Facebook's policy and communications boss, took the fall publicly in a move that may have been meant to take heat off CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, who were both criticized in the Times' story for their mismanagement of controversies involving the company.

NOW WATCH: SpaceX and NASA just blew up a Falcon 9 rocket on purpose, and it has something to do with Apollo 1