How enemies are manufactured, how propaganda passes itself off as common sense, and how fear becomes a fuse in an unguarded powder keg.
I do not know whether hatred is in our nature, but one thing is certain: it does not sprout on its own. There is something chilling about the ease with which an enemy is manufactured. There is also a recognisable pattern to the manufacture of enemies, one that involves assigning collective guilt, linking a group to everything we fear and, above all, the wearying repetition of oversimplified narratives. Systematic cultivation, marketing, plenty of money and fertile soil are more than enough for the flowers of evil to flourish.
Last Thursday saw the publication of a tightly argued, meticulous study by researchers Marc Owen Jones and Shohan D’Souza, entitled Manufacturing the Great Replacement, which documents just such an operation on an industrial scale. A first, effortless conclusion one can draw from it is that bigotry is far more than a spontaneous outburst of our darkest instincts. It may very well be an organised project, with a plan, an advertising budget, digital tools, multiple identities and distribution on a vast scale. The motives can only be sinister.
The researchers record at least 533 million views or other forms of exposure to racist, Islamophobic content across 30 countries between October 2023 and October 2026. That figure combines views, reach and impressions, and the report estimates that if advertising material that could not be archived is included, the number could jump by almost 35%. However you look at it, this is a hate-spreading operation of unprecedented scale.
One might imagine that behind this toxic digital cloud lurk a few cranks who spend day and night on social media hunting for scapegoats. The operation, however, involved thousands of paid ads on Facebook and TikTok, hundreds of YouTube videos, accounts on other platforms, fake identities, account networks, murky online campaigns and even outdoor advertising.
It ran in three phases over 37 months, under different identities and through different channels. When Meta took down the original network, the activity resurfaced under new identities. Propaganda, you see, has many tentacles, and all the adaptability of a pest.
What is most telling is the content. Europe is portrayed as threatened by a supposedly organised “Islamisation”. Muslims and migrants are presented not as people with different journeys, needs, desires and stories, not even as numbers, but as a single body that invades, conquers, replaces. The European version of the campaign draws on far-right conspiracy theory. A hidden power is supposedly pulling the strings, funding the replacement, manipulating European institutions and seeking the Islamisation of the old continent.
Then there is the ease with which such operations slip past oversight mechanisms. Almost none of the ads were declared as political or social content, so Meta’s transparency rules for such material were never triggered. The platforms, which have turned the surveillance of human attention into a business model, often appear unable (or unwilling) to check who is paying to poison that attention. Algorithms have no moral compass. They run on engagement metrics.
Anger, outrage, anxiety and a sense of threat are exceptionally efficient fuels for the attention economy. I am not claiming that technology invented hatred. But it has very obligingly handed it the means to spread faster, disguise itself more easily and reach receptive ears.
This is how historical images of conquest, inflammatory slogans, and AI-generated videos and songs are pressed into service to present the presence of Muslims in Europe as “proof” of an organised campaign of conquest. The complex reality around us (people on the move, societies in flux, complicated problems that demand political solutions) is boiled down to a simplistic, easily digestible fairy tale: there is an enemy coming to replace us, and shadowy centres are pulling the strings to make it happen.
The “Great Replacement” theory, that racist, conspiratorial delirium according to which Europe’s lily-white native population is being deliberately and methodically replaced by darker-skinned migrants, is nothing new. What is striking is that ideas like this, which once drifted around the most lunatic fringes of the far right, have now found their way into mainstream political debate.
They no longer (need to) be voiced by a neo-Nazi with a swastika armband and a shaven head. They are served up normalised, in a suit and tie, with parliamentary decorum and a respectable air, wrapped in the sheep’s clothing of “concern” for security, identity and social cohesion.
Worse still, European governments, even the… not-quite-right ones, find the political utility of conspiracy theory very convenient indeed: it offers an easy explanation for the hard problems besetting us, such as economic insecurity, social inequality, a crisis of trust in institutions, political paralysis and so on. Propaganda thus finds fertile ground, flattering those who are already afraid, validating those looking for scapegoats and clearing the picture for the undecided.
In this way, an idea that until recently provoked revulsion becomes entrenched. After all, you do not need to convince everyone. It is enough to make enough noise, amplifying existing prejudices. Normalisation creeps in gradually, shifting the limits of the acceptable in the manner of the boiling frog.
There is also a dimension the report’s authors approach with particular care. Technical traces, metadata, indications from the way the accounts operated and certain digital trails lead, with moderate to high confidence, to the assessment that the operation originated in Israel. Who ultimately commissioned or funded it, however, has not been established. In any case, we do not need to know who was ultimately behind it to grasp the problem.
At a time when Palestinians are enduring displacement, destruction and the threat of losing their land, a campaign with a probable Israeli point of origin appears to be feeding the idea in Europe that Arabs and Muslims are not welcome there either. We need not invent a single master plan to recognise the inhuman paradox: people for whom there is no room in their own land appear to have no room anywhere else either. They are, in other words, surplus to geography. You understand, I think, what that means.
Be that as it may, we have allowed the heavy industry of bigotry to roam free and distribute its filthy product using modern marketing methods. I cannot, nor do I wish to, imagine what superficial benefits some derive from campaigns of this kind, what their aims are, and why they enjoy playing with fire on a planet that looks like an unguarded powder keg.
