The 2024 Summer Olympics: A Review of Disinformation Narratives
French conspiracy sites like Geopolintel and l’Echelle de Jacob called the Opening Ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris ‘satanic,’ leveraging World Economic Forum conspiracy theory themes and ‘woke virus’ rhetoric to denigrate the event and depict it as propaganda from the global elite.
Global Disinformation Index
The Summer Olympics opened in Paris on 26 July 2024, with over 11,000 athletes present for three weeks of competition and millions of people watching around the globe. Though the games are intended to represent international unity and cooperation, they also have a long history of politicisation and controversy. The Summer 2024 Olympics were no different, with disinformation narratives emerging around event security, the Opening and Closing ceremonies, the politics of French society and gendered, anti-LGBTQ+ discourse about athletes, performers and organisers. These narratives came from domestic French and foreign actors, with Russia playing a particularly prominent role in foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI).
The Paris Olympics followed recent snap elections in France, in which the country voted in three main political factions – the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire coalition, President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition, and the right-wing faction led by far-right party Rassemblement National. None of these three groups achieved an outright majority, leaving the country’s legislature rudderless ahead of the games and political tensions evident across France. The Olympics quickly became a conduit for domestic actors to exploit these tensions and tensions from previous events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
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