Israel linked to far-right great replacement theory influence campaign

A REPORT has found “one of the largest documented influence campaigns,” that pushed a far-right conspiracy theory to millions of social media users, is linked to Israel. Manufacturing The Great Replacement, published last week, found that: “Between October 2023 and October 2026, the [influence] operation targeted audiences across Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Middle East with racist, anti-Muslim, anti-migrant, anti-Qatar and anti-Iran messaging.” The operation targeted over 30 countries, is estimated to have reached over 800 million advert “exposures,” and is estimated to have cost approximately £6 million. READ MORE: Inside the information war that is shaping the story of Gaza The “great replacement” is a debunked white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory that states that ethnic white Europeans are being deliberately replaced by non-white peoples – especially from Muslim countries – through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the birth rate of white Europeans. The report is the culmination of three years of research by authors Marc Owen Jones and Sohan Dsouza, who describe the operation as “one of the largest influence and disinformation campaigns ever documented". Sohan Dsouza told The National: “We can’t really assert that it definitely is Israel. But the evidence shows that the entities involved in this operation are based in Israel, and have run influence campaigns for individuals and parties in the Israeli government.” It is estimated that over £6 million was spent on "great replacement" ads linked to Israel. (Image: Getty) The report found that the campaign combined AI-generated imagery and songs, videogame and music-festival parodies, and repurposed footage of migration and protests. It used slogans: “like ‘THIS IS AN INVASION’ and ‘QATAR IS ISLAMISING EUROPE’ with the repeated demand to ‘SAVE EUROPE | STOP QATAR’”. One parody of the video game Grand Theft Auto, renamed Grand Theft Qatar, depicted Gulf Arabs buying European buildings and transforming them into mosques. Another campaign linked “inflammatory protest placards with an image of collective prayer [linking religion with extremist rhetoric and presenting] both as evidence of a hostile takeover.” Dsouza said that Qatar was depicted in the campaign as being the “orchestrator of ‘the great replacement’ and the Islamisation of the West through immigration. Sometimes [the ads were] really on the nose, like for example a generative AI video of a European city literally showing a wall breached and migrants pouring through.” The researcher went on: “We saw many videos that from the xenophobic nationalist ecosystem on X, where there's this grift of posting videos of surveillance camera footage of some dark-skinned person doing something nasty. They would just take these videos and label them as ‘Made in Qatar,’ or ‘Qatar is responsible for this’.” As for the impact of the campaign, Dsouza said that it is difficult to measure, and that they couldn’t “track every person’s views who had been exposed to this content and how their views changed.” But the researchers did find that “of 406 comments coded on UK-targeted Facebook advertisements in 2024, 61% supported Islamophobic views.” Dsouza said: “You can see apparently genuine real-life people commenting, or sharing the content from the operation, and commenting on it with [comments that are] oftentimes very hostile to Muslims and immigrants and matching the tone of the content.” READ MORE: Will Stephen Flynn stick to his word on Israel? The researchers released their first report in July 2024, where they linked an influence operation that was pushing racist content to European social media users, supposedly based in Vietnam, back to Israel. “We’ve been going for three years; we thought it would be over in July 2024 when we put out our first report, and even Meta acknowledged that there was an influence campaign.” US tech firm Meta – which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – acknowledged in 2024 that the influence operation had spent £900,000 on ads on their platform alone. When the 2024 report was published and Meta had acknowledged the operation, the researchers thought their investigation was over, but when a similar influence campaign began again in late 2024, Dsouza and Jones knew they had to keep digging. Sohan Dsouza told The National: “The evidence shows that the entities involved in this operation are based in Israel.” (Image: PA) The researchers eventually uncovered a 37-month long operation targeting 30 countries that had a total estimated spend across all platforms of up to £6.12 million; and involved 1473 Facebook advertisements, 189 YouTube videos, 359 TikTok advertisements, and 105 TikTok account videos. The report found that the operation survived enforcement by Meta in mid-May 2024 and resurfaced in November that year, returning “at scale in October 2025, highlighting the relative ease of bypassing platform moderation.” Bypassing platform moderation is a trend that continued this year. The report found that last month YouTube “terminated four of the 15 channels [linked to the campaign]: Grand Theft Qatar, EURO Summer Fest, Qatar is Responsible and AirAlert, for violating its terms of service". The report continued: “On 26 October new channels under the first three names (@GrandTheftQatar2, @EuroSummerFest-z and @QatarIsResponsibl3) posted eight videos, with the same channel descriptions and the same Brazilian advertisers.” The difficulty in tracking the origins of the operation can be found in the way the end client used proxy companies in different countries to launch the ads. The researchers traced the first phase of the campaign to Israeli interests through Vietnamese proxies and pro-Israel Evangelical Christian connections in the US. But when discovered by Meta and removed, the operation moved to Brazil. Dsouza told The National: “In 2026, they shifted most of their proxy operations to Brazil, or at least someone using Brazilian assets, which were verified as registered Brazilian corporate entities. “Apparently, there's this economy, a little bit different to Vietnam, but based on a similar principle of trading in digital assets that can be used by other people or other organisations or influence operations for running whatever narratives they want to push.” Dsouza argued that the solution would be for governments to introduce legislation to force social media platforms to require a more rigorous identification and verification process before applying to advertise on their applications, and a quicker mechanism to crackdown on influence campaigns once they have begun. Dsouza doubted this would happen without government regulation though, saying that it would "introduce friction [into the advertising purchasing process], so I strongly doubt that they will do this out of the goodness of their hearts." Meta told The National: “Globally, we have removed over 200 networks, and we do not allow misrepresentation, fake accounts, or the artificial boosting of content. “We’re constantly working to identify and disrupt coordinated inauthentic behaviour. Whenever possible, we share our findings about networks of Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour in our Adversarial Threat Reports.” Meta added: “We have clear Community Standards that prohibit hate speech, harmful misinformation, deceptive behaviour and coordinated inauthentic activity. We take action against accounts and content that violate our policies and continue to invest heavily in identifying and disrupting these kinds of networks.” TikTok and YouTube were approached for comment.