What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Misinformation About the Olympics
If you’ve been following sports on social media over the last week or so, I’m sure you’ve seen photos and videos of Canadian athlete Tyler Mislavchuk vomiting after competing in a triathlon at the Paris Olympics, perhaps accompanied by a headline like: ” On Video shows Canadian triathlete vomiting after swimming in the Seine .”
According to online disinformation experts, Mislavchuk’s illness is one of many Olympic events that Russia is exploiting and deliberately distorting to support a fake narrative about the games.
The true story of a sick swimmer
Facts first: It’s true that Mislavchuk vomited after completing the triathlon, and it’s true that Seine’s E. coli contamination was an ongoing problem at the Olympics, but the connection between the two events is tenuous.
Anyone who ran cross country in high school can tell you that it is not uncommon for athletes to vomit after exertion, and according to Mislavchuk, this was due to the heat and the effort he put into the race, not because coli. . “I threw up 10 times after the race… it got hot in the last laps,” he told Triathlon Magazine . So was it E. coli? Probably no. But that so many people have been led to believe this is part of a larger drama that has been going on since the Cold War.
Russia and the Spread of Negative Olympic Stories
According to Microsoft’s Security Insider , Russia has long been trying to undermine the Olympic Games. According to Security Insider, if Russia “fails to compete in or win the Games, then they seek to undermine, discredit and humiliate international competition in the minds of participants, spectators and global audiences,” and they have been doing so ever since. they were the Soviet Union.
Back in the 1980s, the USSR distributed anonymous newsletters denigrating the Olympics, making specious claims that non-white athletes would be targeted by racists at the 1984 Olympics. It turns out that computers are much more effective at spreading lies than leaflets. The modern campaign against Paris and the Olympics itself began a year ago with the full-length anti-Olympic propaganda film “The Olympics Has Fallen,” which was distributed mainly on Telegram. During the games, Russia either distorted facts in real time or reinvented them entirely using artificial intelligence to portray Paris as a crime-ridden, rat-infested nightmare.
According to ABC News , “30,000 social media bots linked to a notorious Russian disinformation group” are spreading AI-generated videos and amplifying any negative news coming out of the games to benefit Moscow. The shadow network scored a small victory thanks to post-race footage of Mislavchuk, but its biggest victory in 2024 is a PR coup orchestrated by Algerian boxer Imane Khelif.
Gender controversies and women’s sports
Russian botnets quickly sprang into action after Angela Carini left her first-round Olympic boxing match against Khelif. With the help of (alleged) people like Donald Trump and J.K. Rowling , the Russian disinformation network was able to spark a controversy over Khelif’s gender that probably reached your MAGA uncle. Claims that Khelif is not in fact a woman have been bolstered by an International Boxing Association ban in 2023. This gives the impression that there are two sides to the story, until you find out that IBA has deep ties to Russia and its eligibility criteria are extremely suspicious.
What can be done about Russian Olympic disinformation?
While French authorities have taken a fairly tough approach to disinformation, including arresting a Russian for “conducting intelligence work at the direction of a foreign power” to “provoke hostilities in France,” combatting online disinformation is very difficult. Now, until Tom Cruise cancels the show , the best we can do is treat sports news as skeptically as we’ve learned to treat political news.