A years-long, paid-for influence operation promoting racist, Islamophobic and anti-Qatar views has been uncovered by two academics, with the evidence suggesting the campaign was intended to serve Israeli interests.
The investigation, which took three years, was published on Thursday. It detailed an operation that likely cost more than $11m and was carried out across 30 countries, including in Europe, the United States and Lebanon.
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As part of the campaign, several million internet users were exposed to advertisements on sites like YouTube, TikTok and Facebook that pushed an agenda, according to the report titled Manufacturing the “Great Replacement”.
Marc Owen Jones, a professor at Northwestern University’s Doha campus, and independent researcher Sohan Dsouza, the academics who published the report, called it “perhaps one of the biggest digital influence and disinformation operations ever documented”.
Their report uncovered at least 533 million exposures of social media advertisements promoting anti-Muslim, anti-migrant, racist and anti-Qatar views between October 2023 and October 2026. It added that the advertisements were launched ahead of elections in some of the target countries.
One example, also reported by French newspaper Le Monde, looked at how the campaign had targeted France and found that “a historical analysis of the ads pushed by the campaign’s backers suggests that they repeatedly sought to align with national electoral calendars”, the newspaper said.
“Buying in France ran through the months before the June 2024 European Parliament elections, and UK buying stopped on 17 May 2024, days before the general election was called,” the researchers said.
“Its sustained promotion of anti-Muslim and anti-migrant narratives raises concerns about attempts to shape the political environment ahead of these votes, beyond the formal election campaign period,” they added.
Additionally, the report warned that “the campaign remains active in countries approaching major elections, including France and Italy in 2027”.
Qatar targeted
France accounted for about a third of the total number of advertisement placements, the highest share among the countries targeted, the report said. Meanwhile, the advertisements recorded the largest number of exposures in the United Kingdom, at 154 million. The US came second, with 100 million.
“In Europe, the ads use the structure of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, that white people are being replaced by immigrants,” Jones said.
“Qatar takes the role that anti-Semitic versions give to George Soros: a hidden power directing Muslim immigration to ‘Islamise’ Europe,” he noted, referring to the Jewish billionaire philanthropist and frequent target of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Separately, one of the campaigns that appeared on TikTok promoted regime change in Iran to audiences in Europe. The ads first began running on February 24, four days before the US and Israel launched their war on the country, the investigation found.
According to the report, the evidence suggests with “moderate to high confidence” that the influence operation was launched from within Israel and sought to portray Qatar as the driving force behind mass migration meant to allegedly “Islamise” Europe.
The researchers said metadata shows that video editors working on the campaign did so in the Israeli time zone. It also reveals that they used machines with Hebrew drive and folder names.
Qatar has been the focus of Israeli-linked campaigns before. Last month, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz found that a group of Israeli influence experts and political advisers had worked on a secret campaign targeting Doha in the weeks after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attacks.
Israeli politicians have also lashed out at Qatar several times in recent years, with former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett calling for the country to be declared an enemy state.
Most recently, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party accused Doha, without evidence, of interfering in Israeli elections held on Tuesday. The Qatari Foreign Ministry has denounced the allegations as a “disinformation campaign”.
