Foreign influence operation | Flood of racist advertisements before elections: Traces lead to Israel

Unknown clients in Europe have used inflammatory advertisements on social media to stir up sentiment against Muslims and Qatar. Photo: "Manufacturing the Great Replacement" The right-wing extremist conspiracy narrative, according to which leftists are organizing mass immigration of Muslims to Europe in order to displace native populations, has now also reached media such as "Welt": A "Great Exchange" therefore serves to gain voters for left-wing parties. The term “Islamo-Gauchisme” (in German “Islamo-Left” or “Islamo-Socialism”), which comes from France, claims alliances with political Islam.

A three-year research by the two researchers Marc Owen Jones and Sohan Dsouza now shows the extent to which such stories are spread on social networks with the help of organized advertising campaigns. Their investigation documents an influence operation in 30 countries and was published in the French newspaper Le Monde, among others. In Germany, too, anti-Muslim and anti-migrant messages were broadcast millions of times - most recently before the state elections on September 20th in Saxony-Anhalt and Berlin, in which the AfD won massive amounts of votes.

The researchers have made their study, including extensive documentation entitled “Manufacturing the Great Replacement,” available on a website. There you can understand the individual campaigns, their development over time and the connections researched. Owen and Dzouza come across at least 1,473 different ads on Facebook, 189 videos on 15 YouTube channels and 359 ads on Tiktok. In total, these alone could have reached up to 831 million users - many of them multiple times. There were also activities on other platforms and outside the Internet.

The Gulf state of Qatar is at the center of the three-year campaign. With slogans such as “This is an invasion” and “Save Europe,” he is portrayed as the mastermind of an allegedly controlled Muslim immigration to Europe, supposedly to Islamize Europe. Left-wing political movements that protest against existing conditions are also deliberately defamed.

The advertising content played ranges from videos and music created with artificial intelligence to edited recordings of actual protests and migration movements, such as those in the Spanish exclave of Ceuta in the fall. To spread the messages, the aesthetics of computer games and music festivals were also imitated. For example, a parody of the video game Grand Theft Auto shows Emiratis buying European buildings and turning them into mosques.

For Germany, the researchers identified influence operations in the context of the state elections on September 20th this year. Advertisements ran until shortly before the day of the vote. At least one of the distributed videos reached around 1.5 million views.

In France, corresponding advertisements in 2024 also focused on the months before the European elections. In the UK, advertising activity was halted in May 2024, two months before the serious riots in Southport. The researchers see this as evidence that the campaign was intended not only to spread racist content, but also to influence the political climate of opinion before elections.

The operators of the major platforms moderated the posts after receiving tips and complaints, but were unable or unwilling to effectively prevent the campaign from spreading. On Tiktok, individual ads were only removed after they had already been viewed millions of times. On YouTube, blocked accounts were sometimes replaced by new ones within a day.

The researchers estimate the total campaign expenditure for the period from October 2023 to October 2026 to be more than ten million euros. After the campaign was first uncovered in 2024, Meta disclosed advertising spending of around $1.2 million. The company said it did not know who was behind the payments.

The researchers also examined technical traces in the published articles in order to be able to draw conclusions about the clients. The processing data contained Hebrew names, user names and references to the working hours of the people involved. The timing of the processing corresponded to the Israeli working week rhythm. During another part of the operation, which involved targeted changes to Wikipedia entries, an Israeli Internet address was temporarily visible.

Owen and Dzouza were unable to determine with certainty whether these were real or manipulated indications of the involvement of Israeli actors. There was also no evidence of who financed or commissioned the campaign. It is obvious that Israel is behind this: Qatar has good relations with Hamas and has repeatedly offered to mediate in the Gaza war, for example.

“Based on previous operations by the Israeli government, in particular the campaign known as ‘Zero Zeno’, which was commissioned by the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, I think it is entirely plausible that this ministry was also involved in commissioning the present campaign and used private actors for it,” says Marc Owen Jones to “nd”.

State-controlled influence operations in Germany are a case for the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV). The domestic secret service regularly attacks the media when it has alleged or actual information about such a campaign by Russian authorities. When asked whether the Qatar campaign was also being investigated, the answer was only given five days after confirmation of receipt. However, the BfV did not want to comment on this: The authority informs the federal government and the responsible, secretly meeting committees of the Bundestag about its findings.

Research by Reuters published on Monday shows that narratives like “The Great Exchange” are also targeting leftists in the recent protests in France. A network called “Operation Overload” tried to use the unrest to spread false reports about alleged rape by migrants or the threat of terrorist attacks from them. An evaluation is said to have shown that relevant posts were posted by Israeli government accounts, those associated with the US MAGA movement and accounts close to Russia.

In Germany, details of such an influence operation recently emerged, in which the Hessian CDU is said to have hired two notorious advisers to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a political campaign. Arranged postings by high-ranking Israeli government officials were intended to support a draft law in Hesse that would criminalize the denial of “Israel’s right to exist.”

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