Our team has identified at least 38 fake news stories about the 2024 Paris Olympic Games that circulated online since the start of the year, most of them thought to have been manufactured by Russia – from made-up terrorist threats to fictional attacks on athletes to fake media reports. Even though some of these fake news items were widely read, none of them really had an impact on the public debate. To mark the end of the Games, we took a look back at the Russian disinformation campaign on the 2024 Paris Olympics, which never really took hold.
We counted at least 38 fake news stories about the Olympics that appeared online between the start of the year and the end of this year’s Games in Paris. While it can be difficult to determine the origin of these fake stories with certainty, at least 30 of them seem to have been manufactured by Russia.
This disinformation campaign was meant to “create chaos, sow fear and prevent people from attending the Games,” said Chine Labbé, the editor-in-chief for Europe and vice president of NewsGuard, a company specialised in detecting disinformation online.
Ahead of the Games: a fake documentary and fake news reports
The first fake news items about the Paris Olympics to gain traction began last year. In June 2023, the Russian disinformation group known as Storm-1679 published a fake Netflix documentary on Telegram called "Olympics has Fallen", a title that plays on the 2013 American action film "Olympus has Fallen". The documentary, which is broken up into four nine-minute episodes, claims to denounce corruption within the International Olympic Committee (IOC), even going so far as to say that it acts like a mafia. However, this video series is a deepfake – meaning a fake video created using artificial intelligence – complete with narration by an AI-generated version of US actor Tom Cruise’s voice. The videos garnered between 80,000 and 170,000 views, according to Numerama.
In November 2023, a number of photos appeared online of graffiti linking the 2024 Paris Olympics with the 1972 Munich Games, during which 11 Israeli athletes were taken hostage and killed. The images featured a disembodied hand from 1972 passing a gun to a hand hovering above the symbol for 2024. These images circulated widely, especially on Russian Telegram channels. Ultimately, however, an investigation by French media outlet the Parisien revealed that this graffiti never existed.
In spring 2024, a new disinformation campaign was launched against France. A series of fake articles and videos made to look as though they came from French media outlets appeared online, initially on Russian-language Telegram channels. One fake report, this one bearing FRANCE 24’s logo, appeared online in March. It claimed that a large number of tourists were cancelling their AirBnB reservations for the Olympic Games after French President Emmanuel Macron said there was a possibility that France would send troops to support Ukraine.
Other fake news reports made to look like they came from French news channels TF1 and BFM cast doubt on France’s ability to host the Games. These reports focused on pollution levels in the Seine, where the swimming events were to be held, as well as what they claimed was a poorly built Olympic village.
Security was a major theme in many of these fake reports. In July, a fake video made to look as though it came from French news agency AFP claimed that there was a rise in crime ahead of the Games. A fake BBC report focused on reports of a heightened terrorist threat during the Games. There was also a video made to look like it came from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) warning people about terrorist threats during the Games.
All in all, teams at FRANCE 24 and our sister station RFI identified at least 24 fake videos and articles about the Games that were made to look like they came from real media outlets. Most of these videos also appeared on Telegram first. While these stories were spread online, most of them only garnered a few thousand views, except for two exceptions that garnered more than 100,000. Nine of these videos were also shared on X but, in most cases, only obtained a few thousand views there.
Viginum, the French government agency tasked with detecting digital interference from foreign entities, reported that most of these videos were published as a part of Operation "Matriochka", a disinformation campaign seemingly run by Russia that aims to discredit and saturate fact-checking outlets.
A spike in disinformation ahead of the Games
Disinformation about the Olympics became much more viral in the final few days before the Games opened on July 26. On July 23, a fake video about a terrorist threat from Hamas, which was shared by a pro-Russian influencer along with a message in English, garnered at least 14 million views on X. At the same time, a fake music video said to feature the Russian punk rock group Little Big chanting a transphobic and anti-Olympics message appeared online. Around 30,000 Russian-run bots picked up and spread this video, according to the Associated Press. As a result, the music video garnered 3.5 million views.
Fake news items about the organisation of the Olympics also picked up speed between July 23 and 25. There was a fake story about an Australian athlete who was attacked. There were also articles about how the cardboard beds famously provided to athletes in the Olympic village weren’t solid. You might wonder about the viability of a cardboard bed yourself, but it turns out that these rumours were “debunked” when these beds were first used in the Tokyo Games – in one case, it took nine athletes jumping on a bed to break it.
There was also a veritable wave of fake news stories about the 2024 Opening Ceremony. So called “anti-woke” conservative activists claimed that they spotted satanic symbols in certain scenes and fake news stories about pro-Christian counter-protests gained at least 3.4 million views.
During the Games: fake news about the Seine, the gender of athletes and the Israel-Palestine conflict
Of course, the disinformation continued during the Games.
On August 5, a fake cover story on French newspaper Libération showed a triathlete vomiting after swimming in the Seine River, allegedly because of the poor water quality. The post was shared more than 3,000 times and garnered more than 456,000 views on X. A deputy from the left-wing political party La France insoumise or, in English, “France Unbowed”, also posted this fake cover story before taking it down and apologising for sharing it. The strategy behind a fake news item like this is very similar to the one employed by Russian disinformation campaign "Doppelgänger", which makes fake content that looks like it comes from French media outlets.
Other fake news items about the Olympic Games exploited tension around the conflict between Israel and Palestine. One example is a photo that was taken out of context showing Egyptian athletes holding up the Palestinian flag. This garnered 7.9 million views on a pro-Palestinian account. Pro-Israeli accounts also started sharing an image of Israeli swimmers calling for the hostages held by Hamas to be released. While these accounts claimed that these were Olympic swimmers, it turns out the photo pre-dated the Olympics.
AI was used to generate photos of swimmers wearing suits emblazoned with a transphobic message. These photos were picked up and widely shared by conservative accounts.
To foster division, Russian networks amplified content about the controversy around the gender of Imane Khelif, an Algerian female boxer accused of being a man, according to the Associated Press. During the height of the controversy, tens of thousands of posts an hour about this topic were being posted on X, the news agency reported.
Criticising France and the West
Aside from just disinformation, the Olympics also provided Russia an opportunity to spread anti-Western views.
"Sometimes, Russia is just hoping to achieve its geopolitical objectives by inflaming tensions about ‘woke’ or ‘transgender’ questions,” Labbé, vice president of Newsguard, told our team.
Russian diplomats criticised the opening ceremony, using it as a chance to vilify what they called a “decadent” France. On Telegram, Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, called the Opening Ceremony a "massive failure” and compared the event to a “gay pride parade”.
"Macron-led France’s turned into a slut grimacing to ululations of a mad, ungodly crowd,” said former prime minister Dmitri Medvedev in an angry but barely legible message on X. “Total disgrace.”
A relatively marginal effect on public opinion
In the end, even though some of the disinformation during the Olympics reached wide audiences, its effect was marginal, Labbé said.
"We were quite pleasantly surprised when, despite numerous attempts, the fake news didn’t really manage to take over public discourse.”
One of the most viral fake news stories about the Olympics, the video claiming that Hamas had threatened to carry out a terrorist attack, lost traction “thanks to the fact that Hamas itself denied it as well as the work of fact-checkers and experts who explained that the video was false,” Labbé said.
According to a poll by Harris Interactive published on July 28, despite the intensity of the fake news campaigns about the opening ceremony, more than 85 percent of French people polled saw it as a success. According to an Ipsos poll published by Le Parisien on August 12, after the Games ended, 65 percent of French people had a positive view of the Games. Only 11 percent viewed the Games negatively.
"The secret to having a fake news item that works is for it to look real or speak to a real subject, to increase anxiety. So, since the Olympics went relatively well, the fake news stories didn’t take hold. Quite simply, they didn’t correspond with the reality on the ground,” Labbé said.
