Digital Deception: Disinformation, Elections, and Islamophobia: Juan Cole et al.
Middle East Council on Global Affairs | Webinar on “Digital Deception: Disinformation, Elections, and Islamophobia,” September 2, 2024, featuring Juan Cole, Marc Owen Jones, Sohan Dsouza, and Sahar Aziz.
In 2007, the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. established the Brookings Doha Center (BDC). For fourteen years, BDC provided critical analysis on geopolitical and socioeconomic issues in the Middle East and North Africa and became recognized as a hub for high-quality independent research and policy analysis on the region. In 2021, with the support of its key stakeholders, BDC evolved into an independent policy research institution under the name of the Middle East Council on Global Affairs.
Transcript:
Juan Cole:
Well, hello everybody. Good afternoon, Doha time. My name is Juan Cole. I’m a professor of history at the University of Michigan, and I’m moderating this panel on digital deception, disinformation, elections, and Islamophobia.
The webinar is organized by the Middle East Council on Global Affairs. For Arabic speakers who are more comfortable in that language, we do have Arabic translation available in Zoom. You have to switch to the Arabic channel for that.
The panel’s subject is a recent report on disinformation research by researchers Marc Owen Jones and Sohan Dsouza. This report revealed a multiplatform global influence campaign promoting anti-Muslim bias, sectarianism, and anti-Qatar propaganda. Jones and Dsouza’s report highlights the use of disinformation to spread a broad neoconservative agenda, including xenophobic, anti-immigration, and anti-Muslim propaganda and disinformation.
We’ll hear from the authors. Let me quickly introduce them.
Mark Owen Jones is a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs and one of the co-authors of the Qatar plot. He is also an incoming associate professor of media analytics at Northwestern University in Qatar, where he specializes in research and teaching on disinformation, digital authoritarianism, and political repression, on which he has a recent book. He has also applied his research to concrete situations, such as in Bahrain.
We are honored to be joined by Professor Sahar Aziz, a professor of law at Rutgers University. She is the Chancellor’s Social Justice Scholar there. She is the founding director of the Center for Security, Race, and Rights. Her research explores the intersection of national security, race, religion, and civil rights. Her book, “The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom,” is one you won’t look at the world the same after reading.
The other co-author of the report is Sohan Dsouza, a computational social scientist and open-source intelligence practitioner. He is interested in the intersection of disinformation, political polarization, and its effects. He also has experience as a software engineer, operations analyst, and research scientist at MIT.
We are very pleased to have this stellar assemblage of presenters. Let’s begin with each of them making a basic statement on the report. We’ll go for about eight minutes or so, and then we’ll have a panel discussion. Mark, would you begin, please?
Marc Owen Jones
Thank you very much, and thanks to my co-panelists and the Middle East Council for arranging this. I will endeavor to speak as slowly as I can, as I have a tendency to speak very quickly, just for the benefit of the translators. Since I’m talking first, it makes sense to summarize some key elements of the report. I imagine some of our listeners will have read it, but I want to give a bit more context about what it contains.
The report is called “The Qatar Plot,” a short name, but the longer subtitle, which is important, is “Unveiling a Multiplatform Influence Operation Using Anti-Muslim Propaganda to Attack Qatar in the EU, the US, and the UK.” The Qatar element is important, but in some ways, a bit of a red herring. If I were to summarize this report in simple terms, it is an unknown actor using Facebook and Meta’s ad platform to deliver anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim propaganda to a large audience. When I say a large audience, Soan and I documented that this campaign reached at least 41 million people, primarily on Meta’s platforms, specifically Facebook.
The campaign was also present on TikTok and Twitter (now X), and even in the real world. For instance, some of these campaigns appeared at CPAC, the conservative conference organized annually, and also on a giant digital billboard in Times Square.
I will talk mostly about the digital elements, and the other bits will come up. The people running this campaign, and I say people because us, the researchers, and even Facebook do not necessarily know who was behind it, spent at least $1.2 million in advertising money to spread this campaign. The campaign ran for approximately six months, starting at the beginning of 2024, towards the end of 2023. Ads were being run on Facebook targeting different parts of the world, including Lebanon, the US, the EU, and the UK. Within the EU, it targeted Belgium, France, Germany, Croatia, and Sweden, but primarily France.
When I say targeting, that’s where these ads were being delivered. This is a crucial period as it coincided with a number of European elections, including the UK elections. Recently, in the UK, we saw anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim riots. The timing of that is quite interesting.
The content of these ads typically featured pictures of Arab-looking men engaged in violence, taken out of context, with big lettering saying things like “There will be 60 million Muslims in Europe by 2030.” One part of the campaign was titled “Save Europe,” implying that Europe needed to be saved from a Muslim invasion. This rhetoric was very xenophobic and Islamophobic, designed to create the impression of a Muslim invasion of Europe.
Another aspect is where the Qatar bit comes in. The idea was that Qatar, as a country, was somehow orchestrating this Muslim invasion into Europe. This resembles the notion of the “great replacement theory,” a new type of conspiracy theory. In many conspiracy theories, there’s often a global elite at the top of it, like George Soros. In this conspiracy theory, Qatar takes that role, being framed as the orchestrator of the supposed Muslim invasion. This campaign used manipulative techniques on Facebook that Facebook struggled to combat.
What this campaign shows is that an unknown actor can spend over a million dollars on Facebook to have hate speech advertised through Facebook, reaching millions of people. Facebook’s algorithms are not efficient in combating this. In very few other contexts would anyone be allowed to take out this volume of hate speech in terms of advertising without the platform knowing the client. It’s a huge problem and a significant aspect of this campaign, especially given the violence we saw in the UK.
Thank you for your time. I’ll leave it there for now.
Thank you so much, Mark, for your concise and insightful remarks.
Before we move on to the next panelist, I want to remind the audience that you may submit questions for the panelists, and we will have a Q&A session with them later. You can submit questions through the Q&A portal in Zoom or in the chat. Our Middle East Council host has also put in the link to the report online.
Now, I’d like to move to Professor Aziz.
Sahar Aziz
Thank you. It’s such a pleasure to be here. This is such an important topic, one that is often overlooked as we study bias against various minority groups, whether it’s Muslims, Jewish communities, Black communities, or other immigrant communities. I appreciate the Middle East Council highlighting this topic and found the report fascinating.
What I will use my time for is to provide some context to show how this report is supported by previous reports. What we’re seeing is a really troubling trend that probably isn’t going to go anywhere unless we do something affirmative as a matter of policy and law in various countries.
So, I will use a PowerPoint just because it’s a little easier to show the data and the key points. Bear with me as I share my screen.
Okay, so you all should be able to see it. The first point I’d like to make, or the key takeaways, are as follows. I want to make three key takeaways or points.
The first is that digital Islamophobia spreads five common anti-Muslim racial tropes through social media explicitly and through mainstream media implicitly, at least in the United States. I admittedly focus more of my own research in the U.S. This happens without accountability or concern by government or private decision-makers. I’d like you to compare this digital Islamophobia with the responses against digital anti-Semitism because I think the stark contrast is obvious. I would argue that just as we take digital anti-Semitism very seriously, we should take digital Islamophobia equally seriously. We don’t tend to see the same level of response.
Digital Islamophobia threatens the safety, livelihoods, and equality of Muslims in America and also in Europe because Americans and Europeans are not educated in public schools to understand that these tropes are racist and harmful. There’s a huge education gap, so the public is very vulnerable to being manipulated by these fear tactics.
Finally, foreign governments and American politicians, as well as European politicians, intentionally stoke hate against Muslims and immigrants because it’s an effective political strategy, whether domestically or internationally, for sowing division among the electorate.
So, what are the five staple tropes? Many of them were highlighted in the report, but this is something to keep in mind as you learn about Islamophobia because you will see these tropes over and over. When someone says them explicitly or implicitly, or accuses a Muslim or a Muslim organization of these tropes, you should be on alert that it’s racist. It’s a trope. It’s the equivalent of accusing Jews of controlling the world or assuming that Jews aren’t loyal to their country, or assuming that Blacks are criminals, lazy, and thugs, and so on. We can come up with all sorts of racial tropes against different groups. It’s really important that you understand how absolutely insulting, harmful, and racist it is to assume that Muslims sympathize with terrorism or support terrorist groups.
This is particularly important today while we’re dealing with what I believe is a genocidal campaign by Israel, funded by the United States, against Palestinians in Gaza. The ability to even have that conversation always leads to Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians being accused of supporting a terrorist group. Other tropes include misogyny against women, Islam being anti-woman, the accusation that Muslims are invading the West rather than contributing to the economic and cultural development of European countries and the United States, the trope that Muslims’ presence is a threat to the safety of white women, a threat to liberalism and democracy, and a threat to the security of the nation. Finally, there is a racist trope that Muslims are presumptively anti-Semitic.
Now, I’m just going to show two report summaries that will corroborate the report we’re talking about today. One report, titled Failure to Protect: Social Media Companies Failing to Act on Muslim Hate Crimes, was published by the Center for Countering Digital Hate in 2022. It analyzed 530 social media posts containing anti-Muslim hatred on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube in February and March 2022.
Here are the results: social media companies do not respond when complaints are filed about Islamophobic posts spreading hate and bias, which could also lead to physical violence and harassment against people in real life. Only 3% of the flagged tweets were removed from Twitter. Similarly, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter allowed hashtags like #IslamIsCancer and #Raghead to spread, garnering 1.3 million impressions. Four out of the ten most-cited domains in the Gab dataset—Gab being the right-wing version of social media—are focused on anti-Muslim hate. The second most-used hashtag was #BanIslam. In these right-wing ecosystems, there is a very robust, growing, and dangerous anti-Muslim ecosystem.
The second report I want to highlight is Islamophobia in the Digital Age: A Study of Anti-Muslim Tweets, published in 2022. The researchers analyzed 3.7 million Islamophobic tropes made between August 2019 and August 2021. One year later, 85% of those hateful Islamophobic tropes are still online. Nearly 86% of the geolocated anti-Muslim tropes originated in three places: India, the U.S., and the UK. Spikes in hate strongly correlated with newsworthy events related to Islam, particularly protests, terrorist attacks, and eruptions of conflict. This shows a pattern of guilt by association, where all Muslims are presumed responsible when one bad actor, who claims to be Muslim or claims to be acting in the name of Islam, commits a wrongdoing or a crime.
They each have to prove that they are innocent and that they don’t support that criminal act. We don’t do that to Christians. We don’t do that to Jews. We don’t do that to whites. Nor should we.
That’s another indication of racism: when you impose guilt or responsibility on an individual or a subgroup of an identity group for the wrongdoing of another individual who has the same identity.
Finally, I just want to quickly show the common hashtags of this report. As you can see, the five common tropes that I highlighted are on full display in these hashtags. If you see the most common ones, like “islamization,” “stop Islam,” and others like “save Europe,” “raghead,” some of them have very vulgar terminology which I won’t repeat. But “anti-Islam” is another hashtag, as well as “Islam is evil” and “Eurabia.” These are all hashtags that are growing across social media and effectively causing more and more people to internalize, mainstream, and normalize anti-Muslim hatred.
If you just look at this evidence, these common tropes are coming to light. I’m not simply pontificating or theorizing in the abstract—these five common Islamophobic tropes are real and they’re circulating widely.
Finally, this is my last slide. I just want to highlight that this really ties back into the report that foreign governments are actively using Islamophobia to wedge divisions within American society and within European society. I gave an example of Russia. There was an indictment brought down by the Mueller investigation in the U.S. in 2016 that shows $1.2 million spent every month. Included in the agenda was Islamophobia. For example, here’s one tweet that was intended to sabotage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump: “I think Sharia law will be a powerful new direction of Putin,” and “Support Hillary, save American Muslims rally” included in the sign above.
As you can see, of course, you have Trump and you have politicians in the U.S. who do exactly the same thing. I will just tell you to read two things. The first is Global Islamophobia and the Rise of Populism, which is a new co-edited book by me and John Esposito. Stay tuned for Punished for Participating, which will be coming out by the Center for Security, Race, and Rights in 2025, and will talk about the way in which politicians use Islamophobia to produce anti-Muslim hate in real life.
Okay, I have used up my time. Thank you very much for listening, and I look forward to your comments and hearing Sohan’s comments as well. Thank you.
Juan Cole:
Thank you, Professor Aziz.
Sohan, please.
Sohan Dsouza:
Thank you. Thank you, Juan. Thank you all for having me, and thank you, Mark, for the excellent overview of the Qatar plot report. I want to add some context to that. It’s actually paradoxical that we rail into Facebook mostly. I guess it’s appropriate, in a sense, because it was one of the places where, as far as we can tell, immense reach was available. Thanks in part to the powerful targeting features and algorithms of Facebook, the campaign was also active on X quite significantly.
They also attempted to vandalize Wikidata and Wikipedia pages. They successfully did so, actually, and stayed out for quite a while. Assets are still active on X, Telegram, TikTok, and YouTube at last check. At the time the Meta adversarial threat report was published, there was also a change.org petition that was eventually taken down. But on the other platforms—apart from Facebook, X, change.org, and Wikipedia—assets are still up, according to Meta’s threat report.
There’s also Instagram presence, although Instagram is famously opaque, so we weren’t able to find that at the time. All the same, the spend is very concerning because we don’t know who is behind it. The individuals we were able to identify, namely the Vietnam-based proxy for at least the Facebook part of the operation, as far as we can tell, are not talking or are deflecting. Other individuals we were able to identify as involved, at least in the IRL applications of the operation, are not talking either. That is very concerning. Someone is able to shunt $1.2 million through some content farm in Vietnam. Banks, accounts, and cards must have been involved at some point, and we still don’t know who it is.
We were able to connect the assets across different campaigns using the art and science of open-source intelligence. There were various burner and hacked assets involved, at least in the Facebook part of the campaign, and possibly even the Twitter/X part as well, including at least one hacked page that was apparently being prepared for being a public-facing page. Although most hacked assets were used for sponsoring ads, there were also networks of inauthentic engagement boosters on both Facebook and Twitter/X.
There were also some sophisticated and seemingly novel techniques used to evade countermeasures on many of the platforms, like cycling ad collections and using burner and boilerplate accounts on Facebook. One of the proxies was actually advertising on Facebook that they were able to bring back Facebook pages that had been suspended—and they proved it by actually bringing back Facebook pages that had been suspended in this campaign, in this operation. There were also distraction and coordination tactics used on Wikipedia, and specialized ad-running and engagement booster accounts on Twitter/X.
These were detailed in the report. But yeah, these were interesting and some very novel techniques as well. There was quite a bit of use of AI—not intended to look realistic, but all the same, used to produce propagandistic images of Big Ben bowing down to a caricature of a person. There was at least one incident of AI narration of a video, and at least one cheap fake of a fake audio track overlaid on a speech.
Somehow, all of this was organized, and we still don’t know who exactly is behind this. We’re looking at multiple messaging vectors spread across different platforms, putting security and espionage threats into the conversation, and making it somehow responsible for the “Islamization of Europe.” This harkens back to the whole “Great Replacement” and “Eurabia” tropes, attacking the royal family, and all sorts of things. Mainly, the Lebanon-targeted ones were portraying Qatar as a stooge of Iran.
There were some strange things that we noticed, like pivoting at one point from the ICRC president to targeting something else, which was a bit weird. There were fake organizations actually created by whoever is behind this, like the Euro Extremism Monitoring Project and Verbatim Citizens of Human Lives. This was not the only spelling and grammatical error, and there were quite a few of these. These might indicate that the people behind this may not be native English speakers.
At some point, the focus on more “milquetoast” things like secularism and concern for the hostages turned into overt xenophobia, anti-Muslim, and anti-immigrant bigotry. This shift drew especially on X and Telegram from the anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim ecosystem, literally putting their stamp on it. They took watermarks of “Made in Qatar” and “Part of the Qatari plan” and imposed them over these videos that were already circulating around with anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant TR groups.
This is also concerning given that these appear to have been timed with the election seasons of the UK, the EU, France’s surprise election, and certainly in a U.S. election year. All these places were targeted with these ads.
There is something to be said here about our issues with Facebook, as well as other platforms’ transparency. Most bafflingly, I think — and again, I’m going after Facebook for this because there were some features like crowd triangle that were very useful. There are also ad transparency features on Facebook, which is great. But somehow, most bafflingly, information would disappear from these. There would be specific pages or campaigns that we were tracking, and then when the page or the ad was taken down, the transparency information about the sponsor or other information was actually removed from that.
If an ad is violating standards, that’s especially when we need to know and be able to trace where it’s coming from or find out who’s behind it. To remove the information seems counterproductive.
I just want to say that open-source intelligence investigations involve a good deal of luck—waiting for people to slip up and make a mistake so we can find connections that way. But we got really lucky in many cases, and we shouldn’t have to be. There really should be more done in terms of transparency measures, and I really hope that all platforms—Facebook, X, especially—take more steps to ensure that there are such features that can aid open-source intelligence investigators.
Juan Cole:
Thank you. So, let’s move now to a more panel-based discussion. I thought that would give you all an opportunity to do another round of having the chance to maybe reply to some of the remarks that your colleagues made if you have something to weigh in on. We can switch it up. Professor Aziz, do you want to say anything further?
Sahar Aziz:
Yes. So, I would like to assume that both of you researched the other reports, whether they were the ones that I highlighted or much of the literature that is developing about digital Islamophobia. I am curious to know if you had an opportunity in your research to identify any correlation between the hate online and the hate in person and in real life.
Because there is the dignitary harm of feeling that it is normal, mainstreamed, and acceptable to insult a person’s religion, national origin, demean them, and tell people that one lives within society that your identity group is inferior or dangerous. That in itself is harmful. It’s hard to measure, but those of us who experience it know it’s palpable and real.
The other harm is when people act on it, whether at work, in public spaces, at school, or when participating in politics, like running for elected office. We’re seeing many Muslims being very aggressively attacked and accused of all sorts of things—terrorism, misogyny, etc. The most high-profile examples are Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, but it actually happens to almost every Muslim running for political office.
So, my question to you is: What insights have you been able to find in the literature about that correlation between online and the physical world? And what does that tell you about the need for future research?
Juan Cole
Marc, do you want to…?
Marc Owen Jones
Yeah, sure. Firstly, thanks again for the question. I mean, I’ve worked on Islamophobia in some form for a while, or on forms of hate speech. And of course, the reports you mentioned are vital reading.
Just as a caveat, the report we wrote is a very specific documentation of an influence campaign. The questions you’re asking are so important. Again, it’s the relationship between what happens online and offline. One of the things I will say is that people like to dismiss what happens online because they try to suggest it doesn’t have real-world impact.
If we actually look at the reality, for example, the ads we saw—Sohan and I downloaded a bunch of comments that were replies to some of these Islamophobic ads. We were interested in analyzing how people react to this content because you’re sort of seeing it in the wild, seeing if people are reacting to this. It does promote a level of antagonism and racist and Islamophobic comments as well. When people are exposed to content, they react to it at their keyboard. How much that translates into physical violence—these are questions we didn’t go into in the report. But I would say in the literature, there’s something very sinister and insidious going on here on a general level.
The scale of the campaign, the statistics you mentioned in the report—they indicate a normalization of hatred that is conducive to the kind of violence we saw in the UK. Once people start to operate in an atmosphere or climate that they think is permissive in terms of saying or doing things, saying first, then doing things—that’s really dangerous. This kind of hate speech allows for dehumanization, and as we know, dehumanization often comes before we see this real-world violence.
What this report shows, in addition to those other ones, is not only is the scale of this huge, but people are profiting off it. I just want to add another point: This is, as you’ve said, not happening in a vacuum. In the past year, we’ve seen anti-Semitism increase, we’ve seen Islamophobia increase, but as you noted, it does not get the same amount of attention.
I think this is true of campaigns like the one we documented. When it comes to hate speech or violence against Muslims, there is less interest in the press. This campaign we documented is probably one of the top five in terms of cost of all influence campaigns identified on Meta, yet it didn’t make a big splash as it would if we knew Russia was behind it or something like that. That’s significant. It’s not the first one this year. Let’s not forget that I worked on a similar investigation in February, where people in Canada, among others, were being targeted with Islamophobic hate speech.
That campaign was then tied back to Stoic, an Israeli PR company contracted by the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs in Israel, which has been cozying up to the far-right in Europe. When we look at the discourse online, it’s also indicative of offline activities. Again, I don’t have the answers for the causal solutions, but I’ll say this proliferation of speech, which appears to be increasing without the necessary condemnation in the press or from social media companies, is dangerous and can contribute to real-world violence. I also think the speech itself is a form of violence in its own way.
Juan Cole
I just want to interject that Facebook, in particular, was widely blamed for allowing rampant islamophobic speech in Myanmar (or Burma) that became implicated in violence against Burmese Muslims. This indeed contributed to the crisis of the Rohingya refugee community. The real-world effects of this speech have already been, to some extent, documented, and they can be dire.
Sohan, would you like to weigh in here?
Sohan Dsouza
Yeah, thanks, Mark. And thank you for the question, Dr. Aiz. You used the word “ecosystem,” actually, and yeah, I’ve been using that a lot myself. This whole operation, this whole investigation of the operation, acquainted me with this far-right, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim ecosystem primarily on X. But this also percolates outwards into other platforms. It’s just that X, for all practical purposes, is not really moderated nowadays, so that’s where it really festers. Thanks to the opacity of effects, like the lack of transparency with creating accounts and even boosting them using blue checks and stuff, the issue persists.
As I mentioned, some of the campaigns in this operation used a lot of the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim tropes and even the language, like “cultural enricher” and things like that—the euphemisms that were used by the ecosystem. Actually, the videos and images were just re-watermarked. It’s also interesting that in the recent UK riots, within a couple of hours after the attack, one of the accounts or one of the duo in that ecosystem was the first to specifically claim that the attacker was a “quote-unquote Muslim immigrant.” Barely a couple of hours later, that full fake profile emerged. About three hours after that, it was one of the first to also boost a troll post made by what appeared to be a Hindu Sikh nationalist, an anti-Muslim bigot, a troll post claiming it as a victory for Islam and things like that. It boosted that and further added to this whipping up of an anti-Muslim frenzy in the UK, which fed into focusing the riots on specific targets like mosques.
So, yeah, this ecosystem is something of great concern and will surely be used by other influence operations, given that it serves as a great testing ground for these influence operations on what’s the most effective anti-Muslim propaganda.
Sahar Aziz:
Can I just add one other thing that I think is important? The timing of our discussion is unique. We are currently, in the United States in particular -— I can’t speak as much to the experiences across the different European countries, which are very diverse—but right now, what we’re witnessing is heightened sensitivity, heightened scrutiny, and heightened opposition to anti-Semitism, which I believe is a good thing. However, in that regard, it is setting a gold standard. The way in which I have observed the sensitivity and the attention to anti-Semitism has convinced me just how completely lacking there is of any effort, policy, practice, or laws to combat islamophobia.
I think this is the time for us to use that as a gold standard. At the same time, we’re struggling, at least in the US, with wrestling with free speech and the freedom to assemble and protest. Unfortunately, some people are weaponizing anti-Semitism to quash those rights within the United States. Even if the motives are in good faith, meaning we really want to protect Jews, there is not the same sensitivity to Muslim students, Palestinian students, Muslim faculty, Palestinian faculty, or Arab faculty. I’m using higher education as an example because that is right now kind of the ground zero for these issues.
I would encourage attendees to do that comparison and see why certain groups—in this case, Muslims—are not taken seriously when they voice grievances. No one tries to stop the spread of islamophobia online, in stark contrast to combating anti-Semitism. We need to do the same for islamophobia and countering anti-Palestinian racism, which is a subset of islamophobia. If you look at the common racial tropes against Palestinians, they mirror those against Muslims. Everyone incorrectly assumes that all Palestinians are Muslims, when in fact, I think we have 15 to 20% who are actually Christian.
Juan Cole:
There’s a question already in the queue that we will come to later, but some people are demanding transparency from us. Mark and Sohan, with regard to the reports that you cited, Professor Aiz, they want to know who is behind this report that you did, who funded it, and should they be suspicious of that?
Marc Owen Jones:
I mean, happy to answer that—no one funded it. Sohan and I just did the research. Sohan served in AD, or he spotted it, and we just started working away at it. Myself, as an expert in digital authoritarianism and the region, and Sohan as an open-source researcher, we did it for the public good, right?
Sohan Dsouza:
Yep, absolutely. I wasn’t funded on this. I just did it because I was miffed, basically.
Sahar Aziz:
Well, that’s the way that academic research often works and should work. But I wanted to clear the air in this regard. Let me also state that I learned of this report when I was invited to comment on it and found it to be a very interesting set of conclusions and analysis. The reports I cited were reports that I found in my research. Admittedly, I read them for the first time as part of my preparation for this panel. I do not have any connection with the authors of those reports.
Another thing I find really fascinating is that every time I do my work on countering islamophobia, which is my research and what I do for a living as a law professor, I do get questioned about whether I’m getting funds from the government of X or Y, or foreign governments, which I don’t. But I do want to ask: do you ask that question of every researcher? Do you ask that question of white male American researchers? Do you ask it of white female American researchers, Christian American researchers, Jewish American researchers? If you do, then fine, that’s a fair question. But if you’re only asking it of people who have immigrant backgrounds, who are from the global North and the global South, or who are Black, then perhaps you should ask yourself whether you have internalized some of these biased, racist tropes.
Marc Owen Jones:
Yeah, I was sort of thinking along the same lines. It’s not a question everyone seems to get asked, but I’m used to being asked because, again, we’re dealing with this notion of a report exposing hate speech against Muslims, and the fact that Qatar is mentioned. I mean, you know, whoever created this campaign was mentioning Qatar, right? The question should be about who the hell is behind this campaign—$1.2 million spent, and we get asked about our funding?
It’s quite funny, but yeah, I think it’s just a question that comes with the territory in the nature of the work we do. It can be indicative of the kinds of prejudices that you get exposed to, particularly working, as I do, in Qatar and the global South. Often, I see it with journalists. They will ask questions of people that they wouldn’t necessarily ask someone else. In the world of disinformation, I still think this is relevant. If I were an American researcher researching a Russian disinformation campaign attacking Russia, I wouldn’t get asked, “Does my position as an American professor compromise my integrity?” But if I were doing research on people attacking Qatar, which happened in 2016 while I was living here, I would get asked if I’m being paid or sponsored. There is this huge bias, and it’s based on racism or embedded prejudice. It’s just something that you have to answer, unfortunately. I think it’s good that you added that addendum, because it’s unfortunate we have to deal with that when the real issue is: who the hell pays $1.2 million to spread hate speech?
Juan Cole:
Yes, people are always bringing up about Qatar that it’s involved in these negotiations with Hamas. Then, that involvement is used to tag it as pro-Hamas or supporting Hamas. I just would like to put it out there that these tropes are extremely unfair. The Obama Administration went to Qatar in 2014 and diplomatically pressured it to be a conduit for negotiations with Hamas. Since the United States has declared Hamas a terrorist organization, its diplomats can’t talk to Hamas directly and need an intermediary.
Qatar has often been reluctant about this role and publicly so. In 2018, it was revealed in the Israeli press that Qatar’s government had come to the end of its rope with Hamas due to its obstreperousness and was going to relinquish the role. The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, then sent the head of Mossad to Qatar to plead with them not to give up this role.
Part of the agreement was that Qatar and Egypt provided funds for Gaza because Israel had put Gaza under an economic blockade. There was a danger of people starving to death if nothing was done. So, Qatar and Egypt provided funds for Gaza, not for Hamas in particular. These funds were actually deposited in Israeli bank accounts, and it was Netanyahu’s government that moved the funds to Gaza. If anyone was funding Hamas in that way, it was Netanyahu himself, not Qatar.
I think if the international community wants Qatar to play this role of intermediary, it’s extremely unfair to attempt to tag it as somehow supportive of Hamas, for which there is no evidence at all.
Sahar Aziz:
Can I also just add, Professor Cole, the irony that, again, the timing matters? It’s September 2nd, 2024, and it’s been almost 11 months now of the Israelis just destroying Gaza and killing over 50,000 Palestinians, injuring over 100,000, and 2.4 million are starving to death, among other atrocious humanitarian problems and crises.
Yet, when we engage in a political debate that criticizes Israel, the Israeli military, the US government, or Congress, especially if you disagree, you are accused of being anti-Semitic. Meanwhile, people can go and criticize Qatar all they want, and no one will call them Islamophobic. I don’t think criticizing a nation-state makes someone racist against the majority religion unless one explicitly states so. But again, the double standard is that Qatar cannot be a nation like any other, engaged in negotiations, without being completely attacked as having an ulterior agenda. Yet, if someone criticizes Israel, they can’t do that.
We need to be cognizant of these double standards. Criticize Israel if you want; criticize Qatar if you want. The way you do it matters. It could expose that you are just using that as a pretext to be Islamophobic or anti-Semitic. On its face, criticizing either is not Islamophobic or anti-Semitic. What’s interesting about this report is that it shows it’s not simply criticizing Qatar for its role, which is legitimate, like criticizing the US, Egypt, or Israel. It’s the way it’s criticized, the hashtags used, and the narratives. They are blatantly Islamophobic, rather than being a geopolitical analysis, a human rights analysis, or an international law analysis.
These are just part of those fear-based tactics that cause real harm to Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians. Sorry, Sohan, you go ahead.
Sohan Dsouza:
Yeah, I agree. You can criticize any government, administration, faction, or the tenets of any religion, really. But with the participation or negligence of platforms, if you are inauthentically yanking everyone’s cranks, that’s fraudulent. We should expect better. In some cases, without violating anyone’s freedom of expression, we should be able to legislate better as well.
Definitely, with some of the feedback we’ve gotten online on social media, a lot of it has been very focused on posting something in response about Qatar’s politics or human rights record, or about Islam. They are missing the whole point—that someone is able to put this huge amount of money into inauthentically reaching people with their message, hiding behind it, and thereby escalating things. As I mentioned, this operation got more and more xenophobic as time went by. Perhaps, in the beginning, it was testing the waters to see if they’d be discovered. But as their identities weren’t discovered, they got bolder. By the end of it, it became almost indistinguishable from the rest of the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant ecosystem.
If they’re able to get away with it, the worse they’ll get. We should definitely be concerned. As long as they can hide their identities and there isn’t transparency, and the cooperation of the platforms doesn’t come in, they will just get bolder. If they hire proxies to do this, adding a further layer of deniability, the situation will only get worse in terms of messaging.
Juan Cole:
I’d like to observe that, in light of these good comments from our panelists, it is not merely an issue of Islamophobia. Any Sikh group that got involved in these kinds of campaigns should have their heads examined because, in the United States at least, an anti-Muslim sentiment and irrational hatred of Muslims very frequently spills over onto other ethnic groups. Americans can’t distinguish between Sikhs and Muslims for the most part, and they have this odd idea that since Sikhs often wear turbans, Muslims must wear turbans, and therefore they attack Sikhs.
Beyond that, it plays into a general anti-immigrant sentiment which can blow back on Hindus and indeed on Eastern Orthodox Christians. We’ve had, in the previous big era of immigration in the United States in the early 20th century, anti-Greek and anti-Eastern Orthodox Christian riots in some cities in the United States. Getting people used to the idea that it’s alright to single out an ethnic group, especially one tagged as immigrant, although many American and European Muslims are second, third, or fourth generation —
Sohan Dsouza:
and people can always convert to Islam —
Juan Cole:
There are converts, but tagging them as immigrants or an invasion as a minority spills over onto others, including onto Jews. Many of the tropes, as Professor Aziz pointed out, used against Muslims are old anti-Semitic tropes. Promoting that way of thinking can’t possibly be good for the Jewish minority.
One last question I’ll broach to you all is this: you weren’t able to find out who was behind this. Almost certainly, it was not the Vietnamese government, although one of the actors was based there. There is a lot of conflict inside the Muslim world over issues in political Islam. The government of Egypt has crushed the Muslim Brotherhood and overthrew an elected Muslim Brotherhood government. Qatar itself was the target of a boycott by four nations. To what extent are these internal conflicts possibly spilling over onto Europe and the United States so that there is promotion of Islamophobia sometimes by Muslim-majority countries?
Marc Owen Jones:
I can go ahead, thank you. I discussed this in my books somewhat, especially from 2016. An important parallel between political Islam and what we saw with this Qatar plot report is sometimes the attempt or the deliberate attempt to conflate political Islam with Islam in general. We saw a lot of anti-Muslim rhetoric coming out of countries like the United Arab Emirates, which were paying a lot of money to create these anti-political Islam campaigns across Europe. However, people don’t necessarily interpret this subtly as anti-political Islam; it just gets interpreted as anti-Muslim sentiment.
One thing about this report, and why I mentioned early on why it’s a bit of a red herring, is that the mention of Qatar almost allows people to dismiss it by saying, “Oh, this is about Qatar.” Moreover, Qatar is being used as a metaphor for Muslims, a bypass of sorts, to talk about Islam. The campaign is fundamentally Islamophobic, and Qatar is a sideshow. This relates to the situation in Rohingya with the genocide there, but we must bear in mind that Qatar, in this report, is a synonym for Muslims. This ties in with how political Islam has been attacked and the consequences of that contribute to Islamophobia in Europe.
One more thing I want to say about the report that Facebook issued about this campaign. It mentioned that it had targeted Lebanon and Qatar but did not mention Islamophobia, even though that is the thrust of the campaign. Facebook thus provides justification for not addressing the most problematic element, which is hate speech against a large group of people.
Yes, Sohan, did you want to come in on this? You’re muted, sorry.
Sohan Dsouza:
I was concerned that Meta did not mention this in their report, as well as generally downplaying the targeting of specific countries, like not mentioning Belgium. Towards the end, especially by the Belgium phase, the pages’ names turned into things like “Save Europe” and “Europe First,” and the messaging switched to more xenophobic content. It seems that phase of it somehow escaped everyone’s attention when making the adversarial threat report. That did need mention.
Those of us who have been studying Islamophobia at least since 9/11 have noticed that it’s a blank IOU: fill in the blank of your Muslim-majority country to use as the pretext for perpetuating the five common anti-Muslim racial tropes. Remember when it was Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and now it’s also Iran, Qatar, Afghanistan. It’s based on geopolitics and who is the designated foreign state enemy of the United States, which then represents 1.8 billion Muslims. Meanwhile, nobody has a problem with that, but if we criticize Israel, we’re accused of being anti-Semitic. We need to parse this conversation and identify when discourse is about geopolitical debate versus a ruse for hatred towards a religious or racial group.
I approach political Islam the way that I approach Zionism. Both are political ideologies, diverse and complicated. There are people who argue that religion should inform law and public policy and that there should not be a separation between religion and state. Zionists, political Islamists, and similar Evangelical Christians in the US believe this. It is legitimate to debate these ideologies and their tensions with liberalism, multiculturalism, and religious plurality.
The problem is that you cannot talk about Zionism as a political ideology and problematize it as an academic, yet you can assume all Muslims are the most extreme political Islamists, like ISIS and Al-Qaeda. This contradiction shows the differential treatment, which in legal fields is evidence of discrimination and bias.
We must discern whether someone is genuinely criticizing some tenet of a religion or state based on their consistency. If they look away when it comes to other religions or states, but focus on one, that’s really suspect.
Juan Cole:
We just have time maybe to tweet one more question from the audience. One of the questioners brought up, quite rightly, the influence of the rising right in Europe and the United States in this matter. We know Islamophobia is very frequently a trope of the MAGA branch of the Republican party.
We just had elections in Eastern Germany where the AfD did disturbingly well, and anti-Muslim sentiment is a keynote of the AfD in Germany. To what extent is this campaign wrapped up with the rising Western right? We just have five minutes.
Sohan Dsouza:
It’s definitely trying to ride this as a vector for its messaging. We’ve seen them drawing on the same ecosystem and very current on ongoing events, celebrating what they see as the victories of the far right. The problem is, many campaign assets have still not been taken down on X and are still active, promoting and boosting anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Unfortunately, the less moderated platforms make it harder for these masterminds to be exposed due to a lack of transparency features, letting them get away with this kind of messaging.
Juan Cole:
“X” is an example of a hostile takeover by the far right. Twitter was, in fact, moderated, and some of these campaigns were being disallowed. Elon Musk bought it with Russian and Saudi partners, I think partly to combat climate change science, but also now Musk has turned it to the amplification of far-right and Islamophobic tropes. He himself is a major purveyor of some of this disinformation.
Marc Owen Jones:
That’s an important point to emphasize. I’m glad we brought Musk in because the report focused a lot on Facebook. Elon Musk is promoting Islamophobia and personally promoting some of the most prolific Islamophobic accounts that are also fake accounts. The whole report we documented was an influence operation where someone was hiding who they were to spread a massive anti-Muslim campaign. For example, if you go onto X and look for the account “Europe Invasion” with two n’s, you will find an account with hundreds of thousands of followers getting millions of engagements, farming engagements, which means it’s probably amplified. This is a hacked and hijacked account with no information on who is behind it, but Elon Musk is promoting this account. He was doing so during the anti-Muslim riots in the UK, fanning those flames directly at a time of huge violence against immigrants and Muslims in the UK.
We need to consider not just the rise of the far right but the facilitators like Elon Musk using their platforms to not only fan the flames but also prevent people from tackling the issue of Islamophobia. Again, this goes back to what Facebook did and hasn’t done, which is to take these campaigns seriously and set a gold standard for tackling Islamophobia. Right now, it’s not just about people not doing enough; it’s about well-known people saying things that, in any other context, would not be okay.
It’s kind of an absurd state of affairs, to be honest.
Juan Cole:
I think we have to leave it there.
Sahar Aziz:
Can I just make one comment?
Juan Cole:
You’ll be cut off in about 30 seconds, but yes.
Sahar Aziz:
I just want to put a pitch in for Global Islamophobia and the Rise of Populism the book we just published, me and John Esposito, which will be in Europe and is focused on Europe. I just want to highlight that fear is profitable and wins votes. There is a very practical, pragmatic reason why this will continue. When you add to it white supremacy and the great replacement theory—all these fears that White society is being destroyed—there is every financial, political, and economic incentive for Islamophobia to continue online.
We need to be very proactive in trying to figure out how to stop it rather than waiting for it to disappear.
Juan Cole:
Well, thank you very much to all of our panelists for your excellent interventions. I think we have to leave it there. Thanks to the audience for joining us, and all the best. Thank you.
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