Although the Paris Games were, unsurprisingly, the target of information manipulation operations, these did not have a significant impact on the French debate, notes a summary report made public this Friday by Viginum.
This was one of the concerns of the French authorities: that the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games, scrutinized all over the planet, would be a particular boon for information manipulation campaigns. Unsurprisingly, various actors have tried to take advantage of the event’s sounding board, but most often without significant impact beyond their restricted spheres of dissemination. This is what emerges from the report devoted to the “information threat” against the Games made public this Friday by Viginum, the State service responsible for tracking down “foreign digital interference” : “most of the maneuvers identified” have not managed to “really penetrate the French-speaking digital public debate”the document underlines.
“43 information maneuvers”
Between April 2023, when Viginum began monitoring social media campaigns targeting sporting events in France, and the end of the Paralympic events on September 8, 2024, the agency detected “43 information maneuvers” from abroad and targeting the Games, including around twenty during the event itself. The vast majority of these “maneuvers” are based on logic “opportunistic”notes the report: they are grafted onto current news or controversies. Thus, the broadcast in July, by accounts “identitarians and ultraconservatives” English and Spanish speakers, of a video taken out of context, showing a Christian gathering: it was falsely presented as a protest after the opening ceremony.
Beyond these attempts, two truly “planned and coordinated” were detected by Viginum, both of which have already been documented by the service. The first, called “Olimpiya,” dates from the summer of 2023 and was the work of pro-Azerbaijani actors on social networks. The second, “Matriochka,” reputed to be pro-Russian, has the particularity of calling out media and fact-checkers on false content, and was the subject of an AFP investigation at the beginning of the year; it has targeted the Olympic Games on several occasions.
“False flag” operations
The Viginum report details several operating methods used by those involved in information manipulation. It looks back, in particular, at several operations under “false flag” : a threatening video against Israeli athletes using the codes of the Turkish ultranationalist organization “Grey Wolves”, but relayed by pro-Russian Telegram channels; another of an alleged member of Hamas threatening the Games, an operation that Microsoft attributed to a Russian disinformation group, Storm-1516. Russian or pro-Russian actors, or pro-Azerbaijani in the case of the “Olimpiya” campaign, are not the only ones singled out in the report, which also cites “The pro-Iranian digital ecosystem” at the origin of content targeting Israeli athletes, or pro-Chinese accounts.
In any case, these actions have remained largely confined to limited audience spheres. In the case of “Olimpiya” in July 2023, it was the relay by French public figures that allowed a video calling for a boycott of the Games to leave its ecosystem of primary broadcasters, and to aggregate, at the time, several million views on X (formerly Twitter).
