Translated material
Sellers of delight and hatred. Who is behind the Europe Invasion account?
Radio Liberty tells how a Muslim couple from Turkey became associated with a popular anti-migrant account on the social network X, which spreads fake news, and tried to pass it off as a project of a supporter of a “strong Europe” from Montenegro.
In August 2024, in Spain, an 11-year-old boy was fatally stabbed while playing soccer in the Toledo suburb of Mosechone. This crime shocked the country. Almost immediately, misinformation that the killer was a foreigner spread across Europe, sparking waves of xenophobic posts on social media.
A post on social network X from an account called Europe Invasion added fuel to the fire. It claimed that the crime was committed by a “foreigner in a hoodie.” However, the accused murderer turned out to be not a foreigner, but a 20-year-old Spaniard. Spanish media reported that he confessed to the crime.
Such false claims are not new to Europe Invasion, one of several large social media accounts on X (formerly Twitter) that spread anti-migrant disinformation. Often these accounts are anonymous and their source of funding is unclear.
An investigation by Radio Liberty found that people associated with Europe Invasion are Turkish citizens living in the United Arab Emirates. Recently, a post appeared on the account purporting to reveal the identity of its real owner, a “Montenegrin of Serbian origin” who wants to “make Europe great again.” It turned out that this identity was a fake, and to create it, a photo of another person was used without permission.
Europe Invasion, an account that posts videos depicting violence and vandalism allegedly committed by immigrants, now has more than 600,000 subscribers and regularly posts content portraying Arabs and Africans as a threat to society and peppering posts with phrases like “this is intolerable” and “we need mass deportations.”
In early October, Europe Invasion boasted that it had amassed 1.1 billion views over the past three months. The account has already attracted the attention of journalists, who have drawn attention to suspicious details, including its multiple past names and content previously published primarily in Turkish.
In September, an investigation by Swedish public broadcaster SVT revealed Europe Invasion's links to a Turkish couple living in Dubai. These people denied any involvement in the account, claiming that an "advertising agency" was behind it. They presented a similar version in response to Radio Liberty reports.
SVT did not publish the couple's names. Radio Liberty identified the men as Mert Kok and Belgin Kok , who were involved in several business projects related to Dubai, including real estate and visa services.
In early October 2024, the Europe Invasion account seemed to have decided to end its anonymity. It featured a post with a photo of the account's alleged Montenegrin owner, a man named Stefan, and a link to " Stefan's" account appeared on Europe Invasion's profile.
Radio Liberty identified the man in the photo as a Turkish citizen. Having contacted him, we found out that he knows Mert Kok. The man, whom Europe Invasion claimed to be "Stefan from Montenegro", said his photo was used without his knowledge and denied any involvement with the popular account.
It is unclear whether Europe Invasion was created solely for profit or also for ideological reasons. However, the account takes advantage of Platform X's monetization features.
"There are organized networks that spread disinformation. Some of the members of these networks have financial interests because they make money by promoting false narratives," Darrell West , a senior fellow at the Center for Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, told RFE/RL. “Disinformation has existed for a long time - we used to call it propaganda. Today everything is different: distributing fake materials has become much easier and cheaper. Thanks to technology, the process can be quickly scaled,” says the expert.
One of Europe Invasion's most controversial posts was published at the end of July, about two hours after an armed attack took place in the English city of Southport, resulting in the death of three children. It stated that the suspect "is a Muslim migrant."
Europe Invasion's post went viral, receiving more than six million views. Its publication coincided with the outbreak of unrest throughout England, which targeted Muslim communities.
The suspected attacker, who was soon charged with murder, was in fact a British citizen born in Cardiff, Wales, to Rwandan parents. Prosecutors later accused him of attempting to produce the toxin ricin and possessing literature published by the terrorist group al-Qaeda.
The head of London's police force said the riots were "fueled by misinformation."
Dubai trail
Europe Invasion and another associated account, Daily Reports , have been on Twitter (now X) for over a decade. During this time, they changed their names several times, according to data collected and analyzed by Radio Liberty. In their previous incarnations, both accounts posted content primarily in Turkish, but in early 2024 they deleted all past posts and began posting mostly anti-migrant content in English.
At this moment, the first clues appeared leading to the answer to the question about account owners. In early March, the account now known as Europe Invasion posted a video from a now-defunct YouTube channel called West To Dubai (backup link ), which seemed to focus on the practical aspects of life in the UAE. However, one of the videos deviated sharply from this topic.
Instead of discussing Dubai, it contained AI-generated pictures and described how dangerous it was to allow Afghan migrants into Europe.
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0:00 0:00:24“If we want to protect our future, our civilization and our children, we must say stop to this infiltration,” a female voiceover says in heavily accented English.
The Europe Invasion post describes the video's creator as "a university student named Alyssa." The West To Dubai channel also had another video about life in Dubai, which was narrated by a woman with the same name, and this time she was shown on the screen. Social media analysis by Radio Liberty confirmed that the woman appearing in the second video was not, in fact, "Alissa" but Belgin Kok, whose LinkedIn profile indicates she is the owner of a Dubai-based company selling the traditional Turkish sweet, Turkish delight.
Radio Liberty also used two voice recognition algorithms to compare the announcer's voice in a video published by Europe Invasion and in several videos in which Belgin Kok appears on screen, including a video about life in Dubai that she hosted in English under the pseudonym Alyssa. Both algorithms showed that Belgin Kok's voice matches the voice of "Alissa" from an AI-generated video warning about Afghan migrants in Europe.
Another video posted on April 14 on the YouTube channel of Dubaideyiz, a Dubai-based company associated with Mert and Belgin Kok, shows Belgin speaking in Turkish about the benefits of living in the emirate. A video posted to Belgin's YouTube channel under the pseudonym Alyssa that same month deals with the same topic, although "Alyssa" speaks English.
Europe Invasion has other connections to the fictional "Alissa". For example, on Alissa's YouTube channel there was a link to the @alissatells account in X, which often reposted Europe Invasion records and had previously also published content in Turkish under other account names, including variations of the name Belgin Kok.
The profile of the @alissatells account also included a photo of a woman resembling Belgin Kok, including a photo of a dog resembling a Pekingese named Simba, who appears multiple times on Sister Kok’s Instagram account. One of the photos with him was taken on the balcony of the house in Izmir where the parents of Belgin Kok and her sisters are registered.
Belgin Kok's public and business profiles are closely intertwined with that of her husband, Mert Kok. He works at the same Turkish Delight company as Belgin and appears with her in a video on the Dubaideyiz channel . The same name was previously used for the Daily Reports account on the social network X associated with Europe Invasion.
"Stefan" and connection with Montenegro
Journalists from Swedish television SVT contacted a “Turkish couple living in Dubai” who denied any involvement in the Europe Invasion account, claiming that the advertising agency INV MediaX in Montenegro was behind it. Radio Liberty could not find any records of a company with that name.
Two days after the publication of the SVT investigation, a message appeared on the Europe Invasion page in which the author of the account was named as “Stefan”. He was introduced as the "owner of the Europe Invasion page" and described as a "Montenegrin of Serbian origin" seeking to "defend European culture and Christianity."
This post from September 23 also included a short video with a panorama of the Montenegrin port city of Kotor. This is one of at least three original videos or photographs of Montenegro published by Europe Invasion in August and September .
Less than two weeks later, Europe Invasion posted a photo of a man it identified as "Stefan" along with a link to the man's supposed X account (@IamStefanK). Both Europe Invasion's profile and "Stefan's" personal page posted the same photo of a bearded man with glasses drinking coffee.
On October 17, Radio Liberty sent a request for an interview with @IamStefanK in Serbian via private message to X, asking him to meet with our journalist in Montenegro, but there was no response. Within four days of this request, Europe Invasion announced a "rebranding".
The photo of “Stefan” also disappeared from the @IamStefanK account, and the profile name was replaced by @ContactEI. The account now informed followers that the Europe Invasion brand had been "transferred to a new owner."
We sent inquiries to the email addresses listed for @ContactEI, Merta and Belgin Kok, as well as the email address through which SVT journalists contacted the person claiming to be “Stefan.”
The only response came from the email for the @ContactEI account. It claimed that "the Europe Invasion page, the rights to it and other associated accounts have been transferred to our team," allegedly based in Warsaw and working in the field of "social media business."
We then contacted the person identified by facial recognition software as "Stefan" in the photo linked in Europe Invasion's profile (later removed from there). Like Mert and Belgin Kok, he turned out to be from Izmir, Turkey's third largest city. “Stefan” (not his real name) denied any involvement in the account with the anti-immigrant videos, but confirmed that he was the one in the photo used by Europe Invasion and that he knows Mert Kock.
"Yes, this is my photo. It is very old. It was taken four or five years ago. But this is the first time I have heard about Europe Invasion from you. I have no connection with this account," he said.
The man, whose real name is not being revealed by RFE/RL due to a lack of evidence linking him to Europe Invasion, said he attended the same university as Mert Kock and last met him about six weeks ago.
“He told me about his plans to sell Turkish delight in Dubai. That’s all. I don’t know anything else about his business,” added the Radio Liberty source, noting that he was “shocked” when he learned that his photo was used in the Europe Invasion account.
When we asked Mert Kok about a photo of an acquaintance published in a Europe Invasion post about the alleged owner of "Stefan" and on the account's profile, Kok stated that he "doesn't know this person." He insisted that neither he nor Belgin Kok are the owners of Europe Invasion and the associated Algorithm Coach account. “We are Muslims and live in a Muslim country. We cannot be the owners of an anti-Muslim account,” Mert Kok wrote to Radio Liberty.
Mert Kok's version contradicts the facts. Back in March, the Europe Invasion account published an anti-migrant video with artificially generated pictures and voice acting by Belgin Kok, and she herself, under the name Alyssa, reposted Europe Invasion content and interacted with it until mid-July 2024.
At the same time, Belgin Kok does have ties to the Balkans: on her personal accounts on social networks she identified herself as half Bosnian and half Turkish, her sister and mother also wrote on social networks about their Bosnian origin.
Market of Hate
The problem of illegal migration in Europe is difficult to deny: the performance of right-wing parties focusing on combating this phenomenon is growing with each new election, and some EU countries, such as Germany, have recently introduced document controls even at the border with their western Schengen neighbors such as France.
At the same time, the growing influence of Europe Invasion and other accounts that spread often false and racist narratives about migrants highlights structural problems in the way social media, particularly X, influences the narrative and tone of public discussions on this topic.
In response to a request sent to the X support email address, Radio Liberty was asked to submit questions through the company's general Help Center, which does not provide an option for media to request comments.
An analysis published in September by researchers at Harvard University and the University of Liverpool found that anti-immigrant content spread 66% faster than pro-immigration content on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Twitter was purchased by billionaire Elon Musk in 2022 and subsequently renamed X.
“The speed of spread is very important. Even if you identify hate speech and fight it, after a week it doesn’t matter anymore because people have already reacted,” says Andrea Nasuto, one of the authors of the study, in an interview with Radio Liberty.
After Elon Musk bought Twitter, some major advertisers left the social network due to concerns about the spread of “hate speech” on it. In September, research firm Kantar released a survey that found "26% of marketers reported plans to reduce ad spend in X in 2025, the largest recorded reduction of any major global advertising platform." The Kantar report attributes the decline to "brand safety concerns and negative scores on innovation and trust."
Musk, who bills himself as a champion of free speech, has also been criticized by opponents and European regulators for significantly cutting X's content moderation team after buying the platform.
Researchers from the US Center to Counter Digital Hate found in November 2022 that the use of racial slurs on the social network increased sharply after Musk bought the company.
European Invasion continues to spread disinformation that not only incites hatred against migrants, but also tries to convince the reader that the authorities condone the acts of violence they commit.
"Urgent! The Syrian migrant who stabbed a 4-year-old girl 4 times will not serve his sentence!" – says a post published on the account on October 25.
This attack, which actually happened in the Bavarian city of Allgau and caused a resonance throughout the country, was picked up by politicians from the radical right-wing German party Alternative for Germany, who advocate mass deportations of migrants from the country, to promote their ideas.
But in fact, the judge in this case, Veiko Böhm, did not release the accused, but sent him to a psychiatric hospital for an indefinite period. Often this means virtually lifelong isolation in a clinic: it turned out that the attacker was suffering from acute paranoid schizophrenia, so it was impossible to place him in a regular prison.
“The knife attack has nothing to do with Islamist radicalism, it is caused solely by mental illness,” Böhm said, and criticized local AfD representatives for trying to use the case for political purposes.
Epilogue
At the end of November, about three weeks after we contacted Mert Kok and sent emails to addresses associated with Europe Invasion, the account changed its name again to X. At the time of publication, it is called Update News and has the handle @UpdateNews724. The cover of the account now features a photo of Elon Musk with the White House in the background.
A search on social media X shows that the new name Europe Invasion did not appear until November 28th . On the same day, another account was launched under the Europe Invasion logo and with his previous name, promising a "new start". He currently has less than 300 subscribers.
Update News provides contact information for an account allegedly associated with the Boston-based X Agency, a firm specializing in “digital consulting.” In response to a question from Radio Liberty, they answered that “they have absolutely nothing to do with Update News.” Radio Liberty's request to Update News via private messages to X remained unanswered.
Since changing its name, the account appears to have expanded its focus and quickly gained attention with a post that claimed - without any evidence - that "45% of sexual violence cases" in Italy last year were committed by migrants. Two weeks before the Update News post, Italy's education minister blamed "illegal migrants" for the rise in sexual violence, after which he was criticized for distorting data and spreading misinformation: it turned out that Italian police data on sexual violence for the first quarters of 2023 and 2024 actually use the term "foreigners" and not "migrants", that is, they cover all residents of the country with foreign citizenship. In 2024, their share was about 10% of the country's population - only slightly more than 10 years ago, in 2014, when the share of crimes of a sexual nature committed by foreigners was 40.8%.