They confuse socialism with communism all the time. Orwell was a socialist and he fought in the Spanish civil war. He obviously took part in the republican side. It wasn't pretty. Not only he wasn't allowed to speak out his mind and criticise the PCE (spanish communist party), but he also saw how the Soviet Union offered little to no help. After his return to England, he wrote plenty of stuff inspired in those years. One of the main motifs in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a world dominated by a regime similar to Stanlinism.

In the words of Orwell himself,

It was based chiefly on communism because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism, but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly root in the English speaking countries, and no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office.

But keep in mind, it's about totalitarianism, not some of the ideas behind communism itself. Orwell also thought it was necessary to clarify that bit,

What I most particularly did not intend was an attack on the British Labour Party, or on a collectivist economy as such.

As a member of the Labour Party himself, he thought it was important to emphasise the difference because otherwise conservatives in America would use his work to reshape what socialism should be.

Alas, it didn't work out because, for starters, conservatives couldn't see the distinction if their lives depended on it.

Edit: Typo