By Marc Owen Jones
How a covert far-right-aligned ad campaign delivered more than half a billion recorded exposures of racist, anti-Muslim, anti-migrant and anti-Qatar propaganda across Europe, Lebanon and the US
Our three-year investigation documents hundreds of millions of exposures to anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant propaganda, with forensic evidence pointing to production in Israel.
For the past three years, Sohan Dsouza and I have been tracking a covert influence campaign that has flooded social media with racist advertising. Today, we are publishing Manufacturing the “Great Replacement”, our investigation into one of the largest influence and disinformation campaigns ever documented.
We recorded 533 million exposures across 30 countries, with projected exposure reaching 831 million when accounting for advertising missing from the archives. The operation has spread viciously racist, Islamophobic and anti-immigrant propaganda, repeatedly returned after platform takedowns, and advertised around European elections.
We also uncovered video metadata that points to the campaign’s production in Israel.
Read the investigation and explore the campaign archive here.
Damien Leloup covers our findings in Le Monde today, pursuing the links to Israel’s private influence industry and examining the implications for France ahead of its 2027 presidential election.
The campaign ostensibly targets Qatar. Its advertisements portray the country as a hidden force financing Muslim immigration, corrupting European institutions and secretly plotting to “Islamise” Europe. Mosques, Muslim communities and migrants become evidence of an invasion. Ordinary scenes of European life are repackaged as proof that the “Great Replacement” is happening. It exploits contemporary crises, such as Ceuta, and the French protests, to spread racist propaganda.
In this version of the conspiracy, Qatar occupies the role assigned to George Soros in familiar antisemitic narratives: a concealed power supposedly financing demographic change and controlling political institutions. The campaign attacks Qatar by cultivating fear and hostility towards Muslims and migrants.
Its reach is extraordinary. We documented 1,473 Facebook advertisements, 189 YouTube videos across 15 channels, and 359 TikTok advertisements. The wider operation extends to X, Telegram, Wikipedia and Change.org, as well as billboards in Times Square and Lebanon and a screening at CPAC.
Our exposure totals combine advertising impressions, platform-reported reach and video views, with overlap between audiences. They capture only the activity we could recover or estimate from the available records.
The spending offers another measure of the operation’s scale. Meta disclosed around $1.2 million in advertising spend for the first phase alone, and they said they did not know who was behind it. Across the EU-targeting influence operations with disclosed spending in Meta’s reports from 2018 to 2025, that was the largest figure—approximately eleven times the amount Meta reported for Doppelgänger. And that was mid 2024, the figure now will be much higher.
Tracing the production involved examining information the video editors had left behind. Some campaign videos retained file paths, drive names, software details and export times. These revealed Hebrew labels, a Sunday-to-Thursday production pattern and a computer clock change matching the end of Israeli daylight saving time. A separate campaign-linked Wikipedia editing session also exposed an Israeli IP address. The video metadata included a name matching that of an Israeli political video creator, a lead pursued in Le Monde’s reporting.
Taken together, this evidence points to production in Israel. Who ultimately commissioned and financed the operation remains unresolved. We also found campaign material passing through Johnnie Moore, the head of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
The campaign’s persistence also raises serious questions for the platforms that distributed its advertising. Accounts disappeared, new identities appeared, and advertising resumed. Buyers used intermediaries in different countries, from Vietnam to Brazil, while the operation moved between platforms.
These were repeated opportunities to disrupt an operation that continued purchasing access to audiences.
The electoral timing matters too. We document advertising around European elections and continued activity in countries approaching major votes in 2027, including France, Germany and Italy. Sustained promotion of racist and anti-immigrant narratives can help set the terms of political debate long before formal campaigning begins.
This report is the culmination of three years of collecting advertisements, preserving videos, following accounts, comparing records and investigating the people and infrastructure behind them. We are releasing an extensive archive alongside it so that journalists, researchers and others can examine the material and pursue further leads.
Read Manufacturing the “Great Replacement” and explore the archive.
Please share the investigation. If you have encountered these advertisements, have information about their production or financing, or would like to report on the findings, I would be very interested to hear from you.
“Reprinted from…”New Report. Manufacturing the Great Replacement: Is Israel behind one of the largest racist influence campaigns ever documented?