In October 2025, on Physics and Maths Tutor, a website used by earnest students revising for their GCSEs, an advert appeared: “Save Europe. Stop Qatar.”

“These ads are getting out of hand now,” wrote a user who posted a photograph on Reddit’s GCSE forum. Clicking the advert, they explained, took them to a YouTube video claiming that Qatar was funding Britain’s downfall. 

The words “out of hand” reflect a certain exasperation. After all, Brits had been exposed to similar ads for over two years. On 28 November 2024, for example, days before the emir of Qatar’s state visit to Britain, ads on Facebook appeared picturing Kate Middleton,  the Princess of Wales,  and urging her to reconsider meeting him. Other graphics in the same series told her that meeting the emir was “like meeting Bin Laden”.

The adverts were part of an anonymous campaign portraying Muslims, migrants and Qatar as a threat to Britain. Between 2024 and 2026, our investigation recorded more than 154m exposures to its British-targeted material. Its first wave of British advertising ran in the months before the 2024 general election. 

The ads were also hammering the UK in the winter and spring leading up to the anti-Muslim riots that followed the Southport murders. Social media disinformation was viewed as so important to fuelling the riots that the then prime minister, Keir Starmer, even issued a warning to big tech firms for allowing hate speech to be whipped up on their “premises”. 

Facebook pages with names such as Save Europe and The Plot Against Europe spent more than £500,000 putting hundreds of adverts in front of British users in 2024 alone. Britain was one target in a much wider operation spanning continental Europe, the US and beyond, one of the largest paid digital influence campaigns ever documented. As far as we can tell, this is the biggest covert influence operation targeting the UK by recorded reach and ad spend. 

Its message was a version of the “Great Replacement”: the far-right conspiracy theory that white populations are being deliberately replaced through immigration, particularly from Muslim-majority countries. In this version, Qatar was the hidden force orchestrating Europe’s supposed Islamisation.

The campaign’s portrayal of Muslims and migrants as an existential threat had familiar echoes in British politics. As home secretary, Suella Braverman warned of a coming “hurricane” of migration. Lee Anderson lost the Conservative whip in February 2024 after refusing to apologise for claiming that Islamists had “got control” of Sadiq Khan. 

By September 2025, anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson, who espouses the white supremacist notion of “remigration”, could draw between 110,000 and 150,000 people to a London rally, according to police estimates. In April 2026, Byline Times reported that Reform UK’s head of policy, James Orr, had endorsed the Great Replacement theory. Anonymous advertisers were spending heavily to spread ideas that prominent British figures were helping to normalise

Sunder Katwala, director of UK thinktank British Future, said: "Debates about UK immigration numbers have raged for many years but more recently, as immigration has fallen, we are seeing a shift. Talk of remigration has entered public and political discourse in a way not seen since Enoch Powell. This is influenced by the online climate, including from Trump and Musk in the US.”

The campaign kept going through 2025 and 2026 on Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. Across the world, the upper estimate of how often its adverts and videos were seen approaches a billion, and the cost runs into millions of pounds.

Fellow researcher Sohan Dsouza and I have spent almost three years following the trail behind these adverts, videos and websites. It has taken us from Vietnam to Brazil, to fake Eurovision entries, to billboards in Times Square and to two former beauty queens, a Miss Mississippi and a Miss Tennessee.

Our findings point to production in Israel and raise the possibility that Israeli actors are financing an effort to strengthen Britain’s far right, inflame hostility towards Muslims and undermine support for Palestine.

What the investigation has also shown is the complicity, and seemingly wilful negligence, of big tech. Meta, YouTube and TikTok have made millions of pounds by monetising racist conspiracy theories across Europe and North America, with little or, in some cases, no moderation.

The ads reached people well beyond Physics and Maths Tutor, on YouTube, Tumblr, TikTok and Meta’s platforms, to name a few.

Conspiracy theories need a clear protagonist. It makes them more digestible and less abstract. The idea borrows from an existing antisemitic trope that casts the Jewish philanthropist George Soros as the mastermind of mass migration. Even Nigel Farage has echoed the central premise of the Soros version of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. In a June 2018 Fox News interview, he accused Soros of orchestrating “an organised attempt on a huge scale… to fundamentally change the makeup… demographically, of the whole European continent”.

The difference is that a Jewish billionaire has been swapped for a Muslim country, Qatar, and for the mother of its current emir, Sheikha Moza. In far-right politics, which is often saturated in misogyny, a woman makes an obvious imaginary supervillain.

One element of the Great Replacement, as of many racist tropes, is the idea that immigrants, and Muslims in particular, bring violence and chaos. It is a staple of Orientalism, which, broadly speaking, casts the west as civilised and rational and the east as barbaric and primitive.

Many of the videos dwelt on Muslims occupying public space. Videos labelled London, Paris and Berlin presented Muslims praying or gathering in public as evidence of an organised takeover. The “London” footage appears to show a Shia mourning procession, a kind of footage the campaign used repeatedly, despite Qatar being a Sunni-majority state.

An advert over a photograph of a mosque in Leeds claimed there were “more than 14,000 mosques in Europe”, stamped “Not by chance: part of the Qatari plan”. Videos of burning churches were common, often falsely claiming that Muslims and immigrants had set the fires. There was even a parody series of Grand Theft Auto, in which one episode sent a character on a mission to turn a church into a mosque.

The campaign was well enough resourced to make several mini-documentary series. One, Cities Stories, focused on a different European city in each episode, from Malmö in Sweden to Paris.

For Britain, it chose Bradford.

It dwelt on the number of mosques in the city and stated over footage of a crowd that “Bradford is occupied by Muslim immigrants”. It then cut to burning police vans with the caption “Riots and demonstrations are now spreading in Yorkshire.” It closed on the Houses of Parliament with the line “Can Britain still be saved or is it too late?”

This fits a story the right has told for years about Sadiq Khan’s London as a city surrendered to crime and Islam. Donald Trump repeated it at the United Nations in September 2025, calling Khan a “terrible mayor” and claiming London wanted “to go to sharia law”.

It has no basis in reality, and attacks on Khan have become a dog-whistle for Islamophobic politics. Research published by King’s College London in September 2026 found that half the public thought London had the highest violent crime rate in England and Wales. In fact it had the lowest.

Katwala added: "Views of media and political elites are curiously hardening more than those of the public, in part because social media is skewing elite misperceptions of what the public believes. These kinds of artificial online campaigns are playing an important part in this phenomenon.”

British universities got the same treatment. An AI-generated video took a Financial Times report about the United Arab Emirates cutting funding for Emirati students at British universities and flew flags of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement, over Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and the London School of Economics, set to an AI-generated rendition of Rule, Britannia!.

The same day it turned to Britain’s Formula One drivers. Cards showing Lewis Hamilton and George Russell read “When you drive in Qatar you drive for terror” and told them to “reconsider driving in F1 Qatar”.

Qatari-owned shops and institutions were drawn in too. In April 2024, a Facebook advert titled “Harrods Secrets” ran as part of the campaign, and Harrods appeared in its boycott messaging. A Telegram video announced that “Qatar owns London Stock Exchange”.

The campaign worked on Wikipedia as well. Over three days at the end of January 2024, accounts from a sock-puppet network called “Tronfactor”, identified by Wikipedia’s own investigators after our initial report, made edits about Qatari investments in the UK. The accounts added the same line to the articles on Harrods and the Shard: that Qatar had bought them “as part of Qatar’s global soft power strategy”.

The phrase “Qatari soft power” linked to a new Wikipedia article that the network had successfully created and written, and which is still on Wikipedia today. The article on University College London gained a paragraph on the university’s former campus in Qatar, noting that it had been criticised.

There was even music. AI-generated music videos, including a hoax Eurovision entry from Qatar, contained lyrics claiming that Qatar helps “migrants cross the fence”. One was paid to reach millions, and promoted by rightwing accounts like Visegrad24. Even AI renditions of Christmas hits, such as Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You and Wham!’s Last Christmas, were modified to warn that Muslims would get rid of Christmas.

The aim was to tie Qatar to terrorism and the Islamisation of Britain, and to turn public feeling against the well-known British people and brands that dealt with it.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, disclosed that the first network we investigated had spent more than £900,000 on its adverts. That figure covers only the first wave, which ended in mid-2024.

Meta’s rules say political and social-issue adverts must carry a label saying who paid for them. Almost none of these did.

Meta removed most of the accounts eventually, but the advertising came back under new names, and we recorded another 64 adverts and promoted videos aimed at Britain in a later wave, from October 2025. That may sound like a small number, but they were shown more than 25 million times. Meta’s enforcement was a case of shutting the door after the racist horse had bolted.

By July 2024, Meta had already made $1.2m off the campaign.

That record raises questions about corporate complicity, negligence and dubious business practices. We already know that 10% of Meta’s 2024 revenue came from scam ads. 

It also raises questions about whether platforms give disinformation associated with western allies the scrutiny it deserves. In 2021, former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang described the company’s priorities as investigating manipulation from foreign adversaries such as Russia and Iran. Such priorities risk creating blind spots for operations not associated with traditional adversaries.

Google, meanwhile, has accepted Israeli government advertising smearing human rights and humanitarian organisations. In 2022, it allowed adverts attacking Amnesty International’s apartheid report as antisemitic; in 2024, it carried adverts portraying UNRWA as inseparable from Hamas, directing people searching for the aid agency towards Israeli government allegations against it. Google told reporters that the ads in both cases complied with its policies.

Meta downplayed the racist nature of the campaign. Its report on what was then the sixth most expensive influence operation in its records, and the largest targeting the EU, never even mentioned Muslims or migrants. The closest it came was a line saying the French pages “criticized Shia Islam”.

In 2024, we first traced the network to a small Vietnamese firm, LT Media, and Meta later confirmed the link, saying the firm was “likely running it on behalf of its customers”. Meta did not say who those customers were. Naturally, this raises the question: why take money when you do not know who it is really coming from?

LT Media advertised its services openly, selling pre-verified advertising accounts and showing off collections of forged identity documents. The man who ran it denied knowing about the campaign and told us he had sold the pages to unknown customers over Telegram.

“I don’t want to get into trouble,” he wrote in response to AFP’s Anuj Chopra. “I am a middleman.”

Google, which owns YouTube, is arguably worse than Meta when it comes to (not) moderating content. When the campaign moved to YouTube and the web, its adverts ran under a rotating cast of advertiser names registered in Brazil and Belgium.

Two of the companies behind the ads were run by the owner of Agência Moll, an advertising agency in São Paulo. The owner, Gabriel da Cruz, denied responsibility. He said he was winding the agency down and had sold its advertising accounts to resellers, who kept his businesses’ details attached.

“I have no idea what these ads are or what their purpose is,” he said. He added that the buyer deleted their profile soon after the sale. Agência Moll now has a notice on its website disowning any adverts that still use its details.

Google does check its advertisers’ identities, but the check attaches to whoever presented the verification documents. Hijacked advertising accounts are bought and sold on criminal forums, priced by age and spending history, because an account with a clean record is less likely to be flagged. In many cases, Google appears to suspend the advertiser accounts linked to these racist campaigns, but it does not suspend the adverts promoted. 

Several of the campaign’s YouTube channels, including those behind the videos targeting Birmingham local elections described below, ran through a single account verified in Belgium under the name Liliane Kaufman, which has no advertising record outside this campaign and has since been delisted.

Twice, the campaign’s material passed through a named person. In 2024, Katrina Lantos Swett, president of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice, was photographed at the International Religious Freedom Summit in Washington holding one of its posters. 

Her spokeswoman told AFP she had been asked to promote it by Johnnie Moore, an American evangelical leader who had been an adviser to Donald Trump and later headed the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Her spokeswoman added: “We don’t know who organised the campaign.” 

Moore’s public relations firm, JDA Worldwide, also issued the press release for a protest against Qatar held by a former Miss Mississippi and a former Miss Tennessee. Moore accepted an interview request, then stopped responding when he was asked about the poster.

Neither Moore nor his firm appears as a payer or advertiser, and we found no record of JDA Worldwide registering this work under the US Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The paid adverts clustered around a British election. In the 11 days before the London mayoral and local elections on 2 May 2024, the campaign launched 84 adverts targeted at Britain, 72 of them in a single week. One page, Save Europe, launched its last on 15 May, a week before Rishi Sunak called the general election.

Then came Southport. After the tragic murders on 29 July 2024, false claims that the attacker was a Muslim immigrant spread online, and mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers were attacked in the violence that followed.

Europe Invasion, an account on X, was instrumental in spreading the false claim. Yet before the account had gained this notoriety, the Great Replacement campaign had already been reusing its footage since at least May, pointing to a crossover in the far-right online ecosystem. (It is not clear whether Europe Invasion was part of the campaign.) Metadata embedded in the video files on one of the campaign’s Telegram channels shows that the campaign downloaded media from the social media accounts of others, including Europe Invasion, Tommy Robinson and an X account called RadioGenoa. 

The campaign even interfered in local elections. In February 2026, three months before Birmingham’s council elections, two YouTube videos aimed at British viewers used Shahid Butt, an independent candidate in Sparkhill, as evidence of a Qatari plot.

One turned an ITV News report on his candidacy into a mugshot board reading “Name: Shahid Butt. Crime: convicted terrori$t.” Butt, who was convicted in Yemen in 1999 over a bomb plot, told ITV News he had been tortured into signing a confession.

Whatever one thinks of Butt, neither video offered any evidence that Qatar had anything to do with his candidacy. They had more than 414,000 views. Butt came seventh, with 453 votes.

The campaign concealed its operators, but there were slip-ups. 

The Wikipedia component of the campaign mistakenly revealed where some of the editing was done. On the morning of 30 January 2024, the sock-puppets’ editing session ran through proxy servers in Germany, except for three edits that came from a fixed-line internet address in Israel, interleaved with edits by one of the network’s accounts. In other words, the network was hiding its location, but these three edits gave it away. 

Seventy-eight video files recovered from one of the campaign’s Telegram channels contained clues about their production in 2024. Embedded metadata revealed Hebrew names, nicknames and words in folders, drive labels and editing projects, alongside usernames and Mac model identifiers. These names included Shahar, NachashOti (a Hebrew meme), Nati, Shuki (a diminutive of Yehoshua) and Chezyim (a pluralised affectionate diminutive of Yehezkel). Video exports were concentrated between Sunday and Thursday, the working week used in Israel and much of the Middle East. One Windows account’s exports recorded a shift from UTC+3 to UTC+2 between 22 and 27 October, consistent with Israel’s return to winter time. Lebanon and the Palestinian territories also changed clocks that weekend, but taken together with the working pattern, the narrative, the IP address, and the Hebrew labels, the evidence points to Israel.

Metadata in four campaign videos referred to material imported from a storage drive labelled “ShukidToGo”. The “Shukid” element matches the professional name used by Shuki Duchovni, an Israeli graphic designer whose showreel includes work from the Israeli political party Kulanu’s 2019 election campaign. That campaign was run by Lior Chorev, co-founder and chairman of the influence consultancy Percepto International. Chorev has also publicly shared and credited Duchovni’s artwork. Separately, Israeli reporting named Chorev among participants in an anti-Qatar initiative established after 7 October 2023 that reportedly ceased activity later that year.

We have not established that Duchovni owned or used the drive, or contributed to the operation we investigated. Both we and Le Monde approached him for comment; he did not respond to either request. Le Monde also contacted Lior Chorev, who did not respond.

Israel’s motivation for such a campaign is clear. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, a group of about 30 Israeli influence specialists, including a former Mossad official, mounted an almost identical campaign after 7 October 2023 before it was halted, although there was no mention of promoting far-right narratives.

The far-right angle fits Israel, though. Senior Israeli politicians have openly discussed the political value of fear of Islam. In an August 2026 interview with the newspaper Israel Hayom, diaspora affairs minister Amichai Chikli argued that antisemitism held little interest for ordinary Europeans and Americans, adding: “Radical Islam interests them very, very much. And therefore we need to take advantage of this.”

His courtship of Europe’s far right has included speaking at a convention of Spain’s Vox, whose ranks have included neo-Nazi activists, and meeting representatives of the Sweden Democrats, a party with Nazi roots. In July 2024, he declared that a Marine Le Pen presidency in France would be “excellent for Israel”, adding “with 10 exclamation marks”. In January 2026, he also insinuated that Sadiq Khan and New York mayor Zohran Mamdani were Muslim Brotherhood Islamists, without substantiating the allegation. He also invited Tommy Robinson to visit Israel. Chikli’s ministry also contracted a Tel Aviv-based company called Stoic that ran a very similar anti-migrant, anti-Muslim and anti-Qatar campaign targeting Canada and the US.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile called the UK the “Islamic republic of Britain” in August 2026, echoing the far-right claim that Muslims are taking over the country. These statements and alliances provide a political context for the campaign’s messaging, and a motive. Put simply, Europe’s far right tends to support Israel, and Israel’s far right would rather have those parties in power. 

Britain was the biggest target in 2024 but not the only one since then. Across 30 countries, we recorded more than half a billion advertising appearances and video views. Billboards ran in Times Square, and campaign material was shown at CPAC, a large annual gathering of American conservatives.

And while some of the advertising may seem crude, it polarises. When we analysed a sample of comments on some of the Facebook ads, we saw how they provoked hostility. Of 406 comments under British-targeted Save Europe adverts, six in 10 supported anti-Muslim views and fewer than one in five pushed back. Talk of invasion and “replacement” recurred, along with antisemitic claims about Jewish control.

Meta holds payment and account records that could help answer who paid. Publicly, it claims it does not know. Google and TikTok hold further parts of that trail. Those records may initially identify another intermediary, but banking records, contracts and correspondence could take an investigation beyond borrowed business names to the people commissioning the work.

Others may know more. Those who promoted campaign material, including Johnnie Moore and JDA Worldwide, can be asked who approached them and whose interests they were representing.

The potential legal consequences deserve serious examination. Police should assess whether particular adverts meet the criminal thresholds for stirring up racial or religious hatred. They could also investigate whether the campaign meets the requirements for foreign interference under the National Security Act, including the necessary foreign-power condition.

Ofcom should examine the campaign’s activity within its remit, but there is a significant gap in the law: paid-for adverts are excluded from the Online Safety Act’s general illegal-content duties. Separate provisions address fraudulent advertising, but they do not create a general duty covering every form of illegal paid propaganda. MPs should ask why paying to distribute material places it outside protections that can apply when the same material is posted by a user.

Katwala also called for a political response: "Government and politicians need to catch up with the media landscape. Regulation and election campaign rules are ill-equipped to deal with efforts from outside the UK that seek to manipulate elections or destabilise British society."

A parliamentary inquiry could press the platforms to explain what they knew, when they knew it, and why the operation repeatedly returned. Removing another page is an inadequate response to a campaign whose organisers can buy another account and resume spending.

Millions of British Muslims were cast as a fifth column simply for existing. They are entitled to know who paid to make their neighbours fear them, and why the companies that sold the advertising kept accepting the money.

Marc Owen Jones is associate professor at Northwestern University in Qatar, a satellite campus of US-based Northwestern, where he researches disinformation and digital media