This is a video that has been widely circulated. It shows a supposed Hamas activist, his face hidden by a keffiyeh and wearing a Palestinian flag on his chest, threatening France in Arabic during the Olympic Games. He accuses Paris of supporting Israel, before brandishing what looks like the head of Marianne, a symbolic figure of the French Republic, wearing a Phrygian cap, decapitated and bloody.
This video was shared by many people on social media, including several far-right political figures in France, such as the polemicist Jean Messiah or RN MP Julien Odoul. Except that this video looks like a fake, relayed by pro-Russian networks.
While the opening ceremony on the Seine officially marks the start of the Olympic Games this Friday, July 26, disinformation campaigns have increased significantly in recent days. The American start-up Newsguard, which specializes in combating disinformation, has launched the “Paris 2024 Olympic Games Misinformation Monitoring Center“, in order to identify these operations. “For several months, a flood of false claims about this high-profile international sporting event has been spreading on social networks and unreliable news sites,” they explain on their site. As of July 25, they claim to have identified “15 false stories related to the 2024 Paris Olympic Games in 15 languages […]. These claims were spread on social media as well as on 37 unreliable news and information sites.”
At the heart of these disinformation campaigns, unsurprisingly, is… Russia. “Seventeen of these 37 sites have a history of spreading pro-Russian propaganda and disinformation, including 11 sites that belong to the Pravda network, a collection of anonymous sites that republish content from pro-Kremlin sources and frequently relay false or blatantly misleading information,” explains Newsguard. “Banned from the Summer Olympics that were once a national obsession, Russia has prepared its response: a wave of disinformation and threats of cyberattacks,” states the Financial Times.
Russian “false flag” operations
This video of the supposed terrorist threat from Hamas on these Olympic Games was denied by Gabriel Attal himself. “The first clues we have allow us to say that this video is falsely attributed to Hamas. The investigation and investigations are continuing and the investigation does not allow at this stage to attribute it to this or that State. But it is clear that this is clearly a state intervention,” the Prime Minister declared on Thursday.
According to a security source interviewed by AFP, “the first analyses point to a Russian operation under ‘false flag’ due to a bundle of clues” that point to a Russian origin. An analysis shared by several experts. In the case of this video, one of the first accounts to have published it on X, called “endzionism24”, since suspended, was created in February but remained silent for several months. It was activated a few days before the publication of the video to share content hostile to Israel, a typical pattern of inauthentic accounts.
Furthermore, adds the security source to AFP, “the video was reposted on X by accounts known to be part of Russian networks and was relayed by African sites known to be exit points for Russians.” For example, there is “@aussiecossack,” an influential pro-Russian account, notes on X researcher David Colon, a specialist in foreign interference issues, who also sees Russian manipulation behind this video.
Another security source also points out that in the video, “the visual codes of Hamas propaganda are absent,” and the man speaking makes pronunciation and grammar mistakes, according to an Arabic-speaking AFP journalist. According to the jihadist threat analysis site Sitea senior Hamas official, Izzat al-Rishq, called the video “a montage of Zionist propaganda.”
“False stories discrediting the Olympics”
While this video was the main fake news relayed in recent weeks, Russian disinformation is multiplying campaigns against the Olympics. One story in particular has been widely shared on social networks: the Australian cycling team had all its bikes stolen in Paris. As proof, there is a video excerpt showing BMX star Logan Martin showing his van being broken into. While this theft did indeed take place, it actually took place this Wednesday… in Brussels, as reported in this article from the RTBFthe Belgian public information service. And the bikes were not stolen, since they were not in the vehicle, unlike several of the athlete’s personal effects. “This example shows how the Kremlin’s disinformers opportunistically exploit any current event likely to serve as false stories discrediting the Olympics,” assures researcher David Colon on his account X.
The American start-up Newsguard notes other examples of disinformation relayed on social networks: a video showing a Paris employee adding blue dye to the Seine to make it appear cleaner, the CIA allegedly issuing a warning against using the metro during the Olympics due to strong terrorist threats… A whole story aimed at denigrating the organization of the Games, from which Russia was excluded.
The French body for combating foreign digital interference, Viginumalso assures in a press release published this Thursday that it has already “identified several informational maneuvers involving foreign actors and disseminating content hostile to the organization of the JOP24 with the aim of damaging reputation”. There is no doubt that the entire period of the Games should be marked by a significant flow of disinformation. This is only the beginning.