07/23/2024
NewsGuard Launches 2024 Paris Olympics Misinformation Tracking Center
NewsGuard is tracking the top false narratives about the 2024 Games and the websites that are spreading them
(July 23, 2024 — Paris) NewsGuard announces the launch of a 2024 Paris Olympics Misinformation Tracking Center to monitor the false claims targeting the Games and the websites that are spreading them.
From July 26 to Aug. 11, 2024, Paris will host the Olympic Games, for the third time in history. For several months, a barrage of false claims on the high-visibility, international sporting event has spread on social media and unreliable news sites. From fabricated media reports to content misrepresented as coming from brands or government agencies, false claims have focused on supposed terrorist threats and security risks, Paris’ alleged lack of preparedness, and the presumed lack of popularity of the Games, seemingly aiming at undermining trust in the Games and the authorities organizing them, including the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
To date, NewsGuard’s team has identified and is tracking 14 misinformation narratives relating to the 2024 Paris Olympics in 13 languages: Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. The claims have spread on social media as well as on 31 unreliable news and information websites.
Sixteen of the 31 sites have a history of publishing false, pro-Russia propaganda and disinformation, including 10 sites that belong to the Pravda network, a group of anonymously-owned sites that republish content from pro-Kremlin sources and frequently advance false or egregiously misleading information. The findings confirm the conclusion of a June 2024 Microsoft Threat Intelligence report that documented what it termed “ongoing Russian influence operations” targeting the Paris Olympic Games, with “two central objectives: to denigrate the reputation of the IOC on the world stage; and to create the expectation of violence breaking out in Paris during the 2024 Summer Olympic Games.” Russia has been banned from the Games after invading Ukraine, although Russian athletes can compete as individuals.
During and after the Games, NewsGuard will continue monitoring the claims that emerge, and the websites that spread them. The Tracker will be updated weekly, and include selected summaries and debunks of some of the top Olympic Games-related false narratives identified by its team of specialized journalists.
To view the Tracker, please visit this link.
To learn more about the Tracker, contact [email protected].
About NewsGuard
Founded by media entrepreneur and award-winning journalist Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard provides transparent tools to counter misinformation for readers, brands, and democracies. Since launching in 2018, its global staff of trained journalists and information specialists has collected, updated, and deployed more than 6.9 million data points on more than 35,000 news and information sources, and cataloged and tracked all the top false narratives spreading online.
NewsGuard’s analysts, powered by multiple AI tools, operate the trust industry’s largest and most accountable dataset on news. These data are deployed to fine-tune and provide guardrails for generative AI models, enable brands to advertise on quality news sites and avoid propaganda or hoax sites, provide media literacy guidance for individuals, and support democratic governments in countering hostile disinformation operations targeting their citizens.
Among other indicators of the scale of its operations is that NewsGuard’s apolitical and transparent criteria have been applied by its analysts to rate news sources accounting for 95 percent of online engagement with news across nine countries.