PGI’s Digital Investigations Team brings you the Digital Threat Digest, SOCMINT and OSINT insights into disinformation, influence operations, and online harms.
The 2024 Paris Olympics are in full swing, and fans (like yours truly) are eager to enjoy this year's Games in the City of Lights. While the sport may be taking part in the State de France athletics track, La Défense swimming pool, and Eiffel Tower volleyball arena, social media is where most of the action is and disinformation is set to take the gold medal.
Thanks to the pandemic, we all watched the Tokyo 2020 Games from our televisions and social media livestreams. During these Games, athletes relied on social media— especially TikTok—to connect with fans and get that feeling of support that they were missing due to the thousands of empty seats in the arenas. By 2022, despite crowds being allowed back into stadiums, athletes of the Winter Olympics continued to reach out to fans across the world through their socials. It seems this year's Games is no different as my feed is, once again, inundated with videos of athletes-turned-influencers—from Olympic gear fashion hauls, and tours of the Olympic Village, to chocolate muffins. This new wave of TikTok athletes allows some of the (often less hyped) sports to gain visibility and gives the athletes more ways to inspire a new generation of kids and teenagers to get active. Social media also gives athletes a new type of voice: influence over the conditions of the games. In 2020, athletes used social media to criticise the food they'd been served and those videos led to Olympic organisers in the 2022 and 2024 Games investing in locally sourced, plant-based, and climate-friendly options for the athletes.
But social media's role in the Olympics isn't all wonderful.
You won't have missed that the opening ceremony, for example, caused quite a stir. Conservative and religious groups criticised the participation of queer artists and drag queens, calling it 'woke' and 'satanic'. Many social media activists have, as always, resorted to using disinformation and misattributed footage to amplify their upset. For example, there have been several posts with videos claiming to be pro-Christian protests erupting around Paris, but fact-checkers have identified that these clips are actually from older protests and some of them aren't even filmed in Paris...
Then, you have Russia (whose athletes, for the first time, are unable to display their association with their country and now can only compete as 'Individual Neutral Athletes') ramping up malign disinformation campaigns against France. For example, in mid-2023 the Russian influence actor group 'Storm-1679' released a feature-length film named 'Olympics Has Fallen' which used GenAI to impersonate Tom Cruise and criticise the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Just weeks before the Games began, the same group—disguised as 'Euro News'—seeded and amplified disinformation that Parisians were buying property insurance because the risk of terrorism was so high during the Games, while another Russian influence node posed as the reliable outlet 'France24' and ran a campaign claiming that a quarter of tickets had been returned due to the threat of terrorism. Russia will continue to focus on undermining the security of the Games and the legitimacy of the IOC by creating illusions of protests and real-world provocations.
Whether it is malignant disinformation or "GRWM to win a gold medal", social media is at the heart of this year's Games and we won't escape the sheer volume of Olympic-related content until 11 August. So, we as viewers must remain vigilant and think critically about the information and media we are consuming.
More about Protection Group International's Digital Investigations
Our Digital Investigations Analysts combine modern exploitative technology with deep human analytical expertise that covers the social media platforms themselves and the behaviours and the intents of those who use them. Our experienced analyst team have a deep understanding of how various threat groups use social media and follow a three-pronged approach focused on content, behaviour and infrastructure to assess and substantiate threat landscapes.
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