Years-long anti-Qatar influence operation reached 533 million ad views with racist and anti-Muslim content, investigation finds

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.

The report, titled Manufacturing the “Great Replacement”, detailed an operation that likely cost more than $11 million and was carried out across 30 countries, including in Europe, the United States and Lebanon. Several million internet users were exposed to advertisements on sites like YouTube, TikTok and Facebook that pushed the agenda.

Marc Owen Jones, a professor at Northwestern University's Doha campus, and independent researcher Sohan Dsouza, who published the report, called it perhaps one of the biggest digital influence and disinformation operations ever documented.

The 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.

France accounted for about a third of the total number of advertisement placements, the highest share among the countries targeted, according to the report. The advertisements recorded the largest number of exposures in the United Kingdom, at 154 million; the United States came second, with 100 million. The French newspaper Le Monde also reported on how the campaign had targeted France.

The researchers 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. They said the campaign's 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. The report also warned that the campaign remains active in countries approaching major elections, including France and Italy in 2027.

Jones said that in Europe, the ads use the structure of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, that white people are being replaced by immigrants. He noted that Qatar takes the role that anti-Semitic versions give to George Soros: a hidden power directing Muslim immigration to allegedly “Islamise” Europe, 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 video editors working on the campaign did so in the Israeli time zone and 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. 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.