Researchers trace a three-year anti-Muslim ad operation to Israel-based entities, then decline to blame the state

The report, titled Manufacturing The Great Replacement and first reported by The National, documents a campaign the researchers say ran from October 2023 to October 2026 across more than 30 countries in Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Middle East. The content was anti-Muslim and anti-migrant, and also anti-Qatar and anti-Iran, delivered through paid social advertising, AI-generated video, music, video-game parodies and repurposed footage; one sub-campaign titled “Grand Theft Qatar” depicted Emiratis buying European buildings and converting them to mosques. Jones and Dsouza count 1,473 Facebook advertisements, 189 YouTube videos, 359 TikTok advertisements and 105 TikTok account videos, estimating total spend at £6.12 million, or $8.2 million, and roughly 800 million advertising exposures. Meta acknowledged in 2024 that the operation had spent £900,000 on ads across its platforms — about 15 per cent of the figure the researchers now estimate.

The infrastructure trail is the contested part. The researchers say initial operations were traced to Israel via Vietnamese proxy companies, that the operation resurfaced in November after Meta enforcement in May 2024, and that it later shifted to Brazilian corporate entities. One video creator known as ShukiD was linked through metadata to campaign content and had previously worked on political campaigns in occupied territories. Activity continued through Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt regional election in September 2026 and remained live in France and Italy ahead of 2027 votes. 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 connections to influence operations run by the Israeli government.” Most downstream coverage — Anadolu, TRT World, Shafaqna, Middle East Monitor — carries the finding without the caveat.

Assessment: Strip the amplification and what is independently corroborated narrows to one thing: Meta found and acted on part of this in 2024 and put a number on it. The Vietnamese and Brazilian corporate layers rest entirely on the researchers' own tracing, and a confidence level of “moderate to high” circulating via Shafaqna does not appear in the English-language originals. Note which outlets dropped the hedge — Turkish state-adjacent and Iran-adjacent ones, with obvious incentives. The same mechanism is running this week around an anonymous Telegraph claim that Tehran plans US election-day disruption, laundered through a post on X into partisan American copy. The test of the report is whether Meta, Google or TikTok respond at all.