The murky operation, which began late last year and spans multiple countries, is the largest ever to target the wealthy emirate, disinformation researchers say, as the nine-month war between Israel and the Palestinian militant group rages on.
The campaigns, many using Islamophobic and anti-immigrant tropes, involve an anti-Qatar ad that featured at a US gathering of political conservatives attended by Donald Trump and an online change.org petition attributed to a fictitious person and organization.
The online and offline campaigns — which researchers say appear linked in their overlapping distribution, ad sponsoring and web hosting infrastructure — illustrate the ease with which a person or an entire country can be tarnished in the age of disinformation while masking the ultimate perpetrators.
Joining the dots between the various campaigns led researchers and AFP down a rabbit hole to a series of characters — from a Vietnamese hacker-for-hire to an influential educator and a Christian faith leader in the United States, all seemingly obscuring the trail to the brain behind them.
The campaigns, which look well-resourced, appear designed to rile up sentiment against Qatar across the United States, Britain and European Union.
The apparent goal is to make any “institutional relationship with Qatar radioactive,” said Sohan Dsouza, a London-based researcher formerly with the MIT Media Lab.
It could be taking advantage of the Israel-Hamas conflict to “advance a latent anti-Qatar agenda.”
Among the new websites attacking the emirate in recent months is “Shame on Qatar” –- in English, French and Spanish –- which accuses it of funding terrorists and calls for a boycott of Qatari-owned icons such as Harrods, the Paris Saint-Germain football club and the New York Plaza hotel.
The site featured in an ad at the high-profile Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February. The ad called for sanctions on Qatar and branded it as a security threat.
CPAC did not comment when asked who placed the ad.
Another site — “It’s in your hands” (IIYH) — targets Qatar’s queen mother, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, accusing her country of supporting terrorists and criticizing her for failing to secure the release of Israeli hostages held in Hamas-run Gaza.
The queen mother has no official role in the emirate’s mediation efforts.
The IIYH logo also popped up offline, appearing in February in an ad targeting the queen mother at New York’s Times Square.
The billboard that featured the ad belongs to New York ad giant Outfront Media, according to separate open-source analyses by Dsouza and Doha-based disinformation researcher Marc Owen Jones.
Outfront Media did not respond when AFP inquired about the ad’s sponsor.
The IIYH website links to a change.org petition targeting Qatar’s queen mother. The petition is attributed to a man named “John Anderson,” identified as the president of an organization called “Citizens of Humans (sic) Lives.”
Both the man and the organization behind the petition — signed by thousands — are entirely made up, researchers said.
Earlier this year, US educator Katrina Lantos Swett tweeted a photo holding a poster of a similar campaign targeting the queen mother at a religious freedom summit in Washington, alongside the fake change.org petition.
A spokeswoman for Swett told AFP she was asked to promote the poster by Johnnie Moore — an American evangelical leader, businessman, and advocate for Israel.
