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. 

French conspiracy sites like Geopolintel and l’Echelle de Jacob called the Opening Ceremony “satanic.” These sites leveraged World Economic Forum (WEF) conspiracy theory themes and “woke virus”/”woke religion” rhetoric, respectively, to denigrate the event and depict it as propaganda from the global elite. Other conspiracy sites tried to tie the Opening Ceremony’s organiser, Thomas Jolly, to QAnon-related conspiracy theories regarding a “global paedophile ring.” They painted the event as a psychological operation (“psy-op”) from President Macron aimed at the “manipulation of minds.” 

Far-right commentators decried temporary security measures implemented in Paris as authoritarian rules that “Prince Macron” intended to make permanent as part of a “digital dictatorship.” Several sites targeted black French performers and athletes with anti-black slurs and tropes, and implied that they are not genuinely French due to their race. These same sites targeted migrant participants in the rally of the Olympic flame and stirred up fear of an “illegal invasion.” One site, Riposte Laique, wrote an article claiming that Muslims would rise against France in the name of Islam due to the country’s ban on religious wear for its athletes, characterising the entire religion as militant. 

Domestic actors spread misogynistic and anti-LGBTQ narratives, particularly around the Opening Ceremony, which featured several drag queens and LGBTQ+ artists. Online users directed hate and harassment towards featured performers such as DJ Barbara Butch using slurs, transphobic rhetoric, misogynistic rhetoric and threats of extreme violence. Several sites denounced the event as “woke and anti-Christian propaganda” by allegedly promoting LGBTQ+ ideologies, and one site leveraged the backlash to put out a call to join the French far-right nationalist movement in response. Various far-right actors used the event to portray LGBTQ+ people as sexually deviant and a danger to children, echoing the “paedophilia” narrative commonly used against the community. Additionally, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif became the target of a worldwide harassment campaign calling her a transgender woman or intersex person, although she is a cisgender woman, and domestic commentators lobbed misogynistic slurs against a female politician who defended her. 

Internationally, far-right commentators and conspiracy sites largely replicated domestic narratives. American conspiracy sites also called the Opening Ceremony “satanic” and claimed that there were online attempts to “erase” critics of it, which was echoed by other fringe sites. Social media users from around the world piled on to hate and harassment campaigns against performers using anti-LGBTQ+ narratives and espousing anti-semitic conspiracy rhetoric towards DJ Barbara Butch, who is Jewish, as well as Thomas Jolly, who is not. Many global users also contributed to the campaign against Imane Khelif. 

Russia, which was barred from participating in the 2024 Summer Olympics, was the primary source of FIMI-related disinformation narratives. This activity occurred amid France’s support for Ukraine in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict. In the lead-up to the games, Russian state-sponsored and adjacent media spread narratives aimed at exacerbating existing political tensions and depicting France as unable to host the Olympics, plagued by social problems such as being “inundated with homeless people” and in the grips of violent political riots. Russian news agency TASS criticised the living conditions and competition environment for Olympic athletes. Several Russian-owned and pro-Russia outlets also uplifted anti-LGBTQ+ conspiracy theories about the Opening Ceremony and shared content depicting Macron as a tyrant. 

These examples underscore how disinformation actors leverage major global events to peddle a wide range of harmful narratives. Even events intended to unite the world, like the Olympics, are not immune from being dissected and distorted for gain or profit.