(Washington) Dubious websites calling for a boycott of Qatar, a billboard in New York’s famous Times Square targeting its leaders, hundreds of Facebook ads deemed slanderous emanating from a network with Vietnamese ramifications: a global influence operation seeks to discredit the Gulf state, mediator in the war between Israel and Hamas.
The murky operation, which began in late 2023 and spans many countries, is the largest ever carried out against the small emirate, according to disinformation researchers, after nearly nine months of still-intense war between the Jewish state and the Palestinian militant group.
These campaigns, which often invoke Islamophobic and anti-immigration themes, include an anti-Qatar advert aired in the United States during a meeting of conservative activists and elected officials attended by Donald Trump, as well as an online petition on the Change.org website attributed to a fictitious person and organisation.
The online and offline campaigns – which experts say share commonalities in terms of distribution, advertising sponsorship and web hosting – illustrate how easily the reputation of a person, or even an entire country, can be tarnished in the age of disinformation, without worrying about who is really responsible.
Looking for similarities between the various attacks, the researchers and AFP discovered a whole gallery of characters, ranging from a Vietnamese hacker to an influential educator, including a Christian religious leader in the United States, all apparently inclined to cover their tracks leading to the mastermind of the operation.
“Radioactive”
The campaigns appear designed to reinforce feelings of distrust toward Qatar – no stranger to information warfare – across the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union in this high-stakes election year.
The apparent design is to make “any institutional relationship with Qatar radioactive,” Sohan Dsouza, a London-based researcher formerly at the MIT Media Lab, told AFP.
“The aim is to make the current conflict in the Middle East even more difficult to manage by putting pressure on Qatar,” the mediator between Israel and Hamas, he added.
Among the new websites that have attacked the emirate in recent months, “Shame on Qatar,” available in English, French and Spanish, accuses it of funding terrorists and calls for a boycott of institutions under its control, such as the London department store Harrods, the Paris Saint-Germain football club and the New York Plaza Hotel.
The site appeared in an ad at the high-profile Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February, where Mr. Trump spoke. The ad called for sanctions against Qatar, which it accused of being a security threat and a sponsor of terrorism.
CPAC declined to tell AFP who placed the ad.
Another anti-Qatar website, “It’s in your hands,” criticizes Qatar’s Queen Mother, Sheikha Moza, for failing to secure the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza, although she plays no official role in the emirate’s mediation efforts.
The site’s logo also appeared in an advertisement targeting the Queen Mother, which aired in Times Square in New York in February.
The billboard on which the ad appeared is owned by US advertising giant Outfront Media, according to open-source analysis by Doha-based disinformation researcher Sohan Dsouza and Marc Owen-Jones.
Outfront Media did not respond to AFP’s questions about the identity of the ad’s sponsor.
Fake petition
The “It’s in your hands” site also links to a petition on Change.org, targeting the Queen Mother of Qatar. The petition is launched by a certain “John Anderson”, presented as the president of an organization called “Citizens of Humans (sic) Lives”.
According to researchers, the man and the organization behind the petition, signed by thousands of people, were completely fabricated.
Earlier this year, American educator Katrina Lantos Swett tweeted a photo of herself holding a poster from a similar campaign against the Queen Mother of Qatar at a religious freedom summit in Washington, alongside the fake Change.org petition.
A spokesperson for Mme Lantos Swett told AFP that an American evangelical leader, Johnnie Moore, a businessman and defender of Israel, had asked the educator to promote the poster.
“We don’t know who organized this campaign, and Katrina is not affiliated with it in any way,” she added.
Mr. Moore, who describes himself on LinkedIn as a “peacemaker” known for his work “particularly in the Middle East,” might be able to provide some clues about the source of the campaign.
He had initially accepted AFP’s interview request via LinkedIn but stopped responding once confronted with M’s claim.me Swett and questioned about his apparent association with the campaign.
Unprecedented
Rivalries, conflicts and divergent visions: Middle Eastern countries, including Qatar, are well versed in information warfare and propaganda campaigns designed to gain an advantage over their perceived enemies.
Qatar, which has hosted Hamas’ political leadership since 2012 with the blessing of the United States, has struggled to defend itself against global criticism over its behind-the-scenes negotiations for a possible truce in Gaza and the release of Israeli hostages.
However, the scale of the multinational campaigns it faces is unprecedented, researchers say.
They noted that as part of a massive operation on Facebook, owned by Meta, dozens of pages were used to host more than 900 anti-Qatar advertisements, many of which called for the political isolation of the emirate, accusing it of fueling Muslim immigration to Europe and promoting terrorism.
The campaign was also active on X, TikTok and YouTube, as well as Wikimedia.
Faced with this situation, Meta reacted and indicated that these coordinated actions had their origin in Vietnam.
“We found and took down this network almost two months ago,” Margarita Franklin, Meta’s director of public affairs, told AFP, adding that the company’s findings would be published in its quarterly threat report in August.
“We have also blocked links to the websites and internet accounts of this campaign so that they are not shared on our platform.”
“Proxy”
But in a sign that the campaign is not slowing down, the ads still reached at least 41 million people, according to Marc-Owen Jones and Sohan Dsouza, who cite data from Facebook’s Ad Library.
Advertisements in multiple languages, including English, French and Arabic, cost up to $270,000, according to a conservative estimate by the researchers.
Vietnam is a known black market for trading hacked Facebook accounts to run ads, but researchers say it is not the source of the anti-Qatar operation.
“It’s just a proxy” – an intermediary – Mr Jones told AFP.
Using data from Facebook’s Ad Library, the researchers traced some of the pages back to LT Media, a shady Vietnamese marketing company.
Contacted by AFP, a representative of LT Media who identified himself as Mr. Le Van Tinh, denied having any knowledge of the campaign, saying he had sold the pages to unknown clients via the Telegram messaging service.
He also claimed to have been hacked and lost access to his Facebook “Business Manager,” a centralized dashboard for managing multiple pages and accounts, although he posted tutorials on YouTube on how to bypass the restrictions.
“I don’t want to get into trouble,” he wrote in a WhatsApp message. “I’m (just) a middleman.”