Marc Owen Jones Informed Comment
Marc Owen Jones kindly gave Informed Comment an email interview, below, on his blockbuster research showing a massive Israeli influence operation to spread hate speech on the internet.
This major new report by Marc Owen Jones, associate professor of media analytics at Northwestern University in Qatar, and Sohan D’Souza, a Visiting Researcher with the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, blows the whistle on a massive digital influence operation mainly aimed at Europe and headquartered in Israel, which sought to spread hatred of Muslims by accusing them of attempting to displace white people, a trope frequently deployed against Jews.
Jones writes, “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.”
He noted, “Facebook pages with names such as Save Europe and The Plot Against Europe spent more than £500,000 ($660,000) 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.”
Here is the interview:
Juan Cole: You discovered that for the past few years, Israel paid for ads on Facebook and other social media that gained nearly a billion impressions, mainly in Europe, and cost millions of dollars. Those ads attempted to spread hatred of immigrants and Muslims. Has there been any official reaction to your investigation on the part of the governments of countries targeted by this dangerous and sleazy campaign?
Marc Owen Jones: The response has been muted. As far as I know, no targeted government has announced a substantive public investigation into our findings. We have had considerable media coverage and concern from civil-society organisations, but we are still waiting for governments to treat this with the seriousness it deserves. Someone has spent years buying audiences for racist propaganda aimed at their populations. That should be a major concern.
On the numbers, Sohan and I recorded 533 million exposures, with a projection of around 831 million accounting for gaps in the advertising archives. The campaign began in October 2023. The evidence points strongly to production in Israel, although we have not identified the ultimate funder. Finding out who paid should be an obvious next step for investigators.
Juan Cole: The Israeli online ad campaign even promoted the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which I demonstrated has French Nazi roots in its modern form. This notion lay behind the shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue in the United States and underlies a great deal of Western antisemitism. Isn’t it dangerous to Western Jews for Israel to platform it so extensively?
Marc Owen Jones: Yes, absolutely. You cannot promote the Great Replacement conspiracy and assume its antisemitic implications will conveniently disappear. The Pittsburgh synagogue attacker explicitly connected his hatred of Jews to his belief that a Jewish organisation was bringing immigrants into the country.
In this campaign, Qatar was given the role usually assigned to George Soros: the wealthy, hidden mastermind supposedly financing the destruction of Western civilisation through immigration. The basic conspiracy remained intact. Changing the villain does not make it safe.
These prejudices also feed off one another. We found antisemitic comments alongside Islamophobic ones in responses to the advertisements. Once you encourage people to believe that minorities are part of a secret plot against them, you cannot control where they take that belief.
It also exposes the danger of treating the interests of Israel’s political leadership as synonymous with Jewish safety. A strategy that strengthens racist conspiracy theories can put Jewish communities at greater risk, whatever its authors claim to be defending.
Juan Cole: Meta, which owns Facebook, was sued over the role that postings on its platform played in the Myanmar persecution of the Rohingya refugees. But you find that despite their own policies, Meta and TikTok and YouTube, among others, were perfectly happy to take Israel’s money to whip up hatred against immigrants and Muslims. Lies were told about London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, and the campaign spread the false notion that under his government London has had a high crime rate. The campaign may even have contributed to the Southport riots in which Muslims and immigrants were falsely blamed for stabbings of young girls. Should the European Union look into stricter regulation of these social media platforms, given their repeated implication in social violence and the ease with which they can be manipulated by bad actors inimical to the tolerant values of democracy?
Marc Owen Jones: Yes. What particularly bothers me is that the platforms were being paid to distribute this material. Someone could buy an audience for messages telling Europeans that Muslims were invading their countries and threatening their way of life. The platforms made money from that — millions, in fact.
Then, when accounts disappeared, the operation could acquire new ones and carry on. We followed it for three years. That persistence tells you how inadequate the response has been.
We cannot demonstrate that this particular campaign caused the Southport riots. But it was spreading anti-Muslim propaganda in Britain in the preceding months. If you repeatedly tell people that Muslims are an invading force, you help create an atmosphere in which a false allegation against Muslims can become a justification for attacking them collectively. That is the danger.
The EU should investigate how this was allowed to happen and enforce the powers it already has under the Digital Services Act. There should be consequences for repeatedly selling distribution to covert hate campaigns. Otherwise, removing a few accounts becomes a fairly painless cost of doing business.
Juan Cole: We have seen massive government attacks on universities in Britain and the United States, with major programs defunded, including in the sciences and medicine, and insinuations that these institutions are traitorous to the interests of the nation. Did the Israeli ads contribute to an anti-intellectual atmosphere in the targeted countries?
Marc Owen Jones: Yes, the campaign was actively feeding that hostility. It portrayed universities as corrupted by Qatari money and students as dupes or agents of a foreign power. One series was actually called “The Betrayal of the Academy.” The message was hardly subtle.
This is a useful way to discredit opposition to Israel’s actions. Rather than engage with what students or academics are saying about Gaza, you suggest that somebody in Doha has paid them to say it. Their arguments become evidence of foreign manipulation, and the university becomes an institution that needs to be disciplined.
We cannot draw a line from an advertisement to a particular funding cut. But we can identify the political work these advertisements were doing: encouraging people to see universities as disloyal, dangerous and deserving of punishment. That fits very neatly with the wider assault on academic freedom.
Juan Cole: The Israelis behind the campaign attempted to cover up that it was their doing. How did you discover they were behind it?
Marc Owen Jones: It involved following a lot of fairly mundane records until they started telling a consistent story. Advertising records and shared material connected apparently separate campaigns. Some of the advertising infrastructure led to a Vietnamese intermediary, with other intermediaries appearing later.
The more revealing evidence was inside the video files. We examined 78 videos from the campaign’s Telegram channel. Their editing metadata contained Hebrew folder and storage names, a Sunday-to-Thursday working pattern and timestamps consistent with production at UTC+3. One editing account shifted to UTC+2 during the period when Israel changed its clocks in October 2024.
We also found a campaign-linked Wikipedia editing sequence in which a fixed-line Israeli IP address appeared among edits using German proxies.
Any one of those clues would have limitations. Together, they make a strong case for production in Israel. They do not give us the commissioning contract or the ultimate source of the money. That is where platforms and authorities need to take the investigation further.
Juan Cole: The ad campaign has an obsession with tiny Qatar. Israeli politicians have visited Qatar, and it was essentially dragged in to helping keep Gaza afloat by the Obama and Netanyahu administrations from 2014. Why partner with Doha but massively smear it internationally at the same time?
Marc Owen Jones: Because Qatar is useful both as an intermediary and as a scapegoat. Its access to Hamas makes it valuable when negotiations are needed. The same relationship can then be presented as sinister when it becomes politically convenient.
My assessment is that undermining Qatar’s role in negotiations involving Hamas and Iran was an important purpose of the campaign. If you make the mediator appear illegitimate, you make negotiations easier to dismiss. That suits those who favour continued military confrontation.
The hostage material also shifted responsibility away from Netanyahu and towards Qatar, as though Doha alone could decide whether the hostages came home. It helped obscure Netanyahu’s own failures and choices.
For European audiences, that message was adapted to local fears. People who knew little about Qatar were told it was behind immigration, supposed cultural decline and the “Islamisation” of their neighbourhoods. Qatar became an explanation for almost anything the intended audience disliked.
There is a wider purpose too. Encouraging hatred of Muslims and Arabs can make people less sympathetic to Palestinians and more willing to support or tolerate Israel’s genocide in Gaza. That is why I think the Islamophobia was central to the campaign’s political function.
Photo by Martin Foskett on Unsplash
Juan Cole: What policy changes, at Meta and other social media platforms and among governments, would you like to see come out of your revelations? You suggest that these actors are less vigilant about influence campaigns launched by perceived allies than they are about those coming out of Russia and Iran. Shouldn’t British PM Andy Burnham and French President Emmanuel Macron be furious about Israel’s role in roiling their societies with lies and hate? Shouldn’t Mark Zuckerberg and others who promoted this bigotry be ashamed of themselves?
Marc Owen Jones: Governments should want to know who paid to spread this material among their citizens. British, German, Italian, American, and French Muslims (and all citizens) are entitled to expect their governments to take attempts to demonise them seriously.
The platforms need to establish who is actually buying political influence through their advertising systems. Naming an intermediary whose account has been sold is plainly inadequate. They should preserve and disclose the advertisements, spending, targeting and account histories so that an operation does not become harder to investigate simply because its pages have vanished.
They also need to act against the operation as a whole. Taking down an account achieves very little if the same people can return with the same videos and a new name.
Governments should obtain the payment records and follow the money. We have reached the limits of what researchers can establish from public records. There are institutions with the power to go further, and they should use it.
And yes, Zuckerberg and the other executives should be ashamed. Their companies earned money distributing material that told people their Muslim neighbours were part of an invasion. An apology would be welcome; meaningful accountability would be better.
Finally, we need a consistent standard. I find it difficult to imagine this receiving such a muted political response if the evidence pointed to Moscow or Tehran. An ally should not get a free pass to interfere in your society or spread hatred against your citizens.
Juan Cole’s Informed Comment delivers independent, expert analysis of war, the Middle East, climate change, and U.S. foreign policy. Help sustain this work
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