The 2024 Summer Olympics are just 53 days from getting underway in Paris. Hundreds of nations are set to send their best athletes in the hopes of bringing home gold medals.
One country that will not be participating is Russia. The IOC banned Russia in October 2023 due to its ongoing occupation of Ukraine. Russian athletes who qualified before the ban will still be eligible to participate as “individual neutral athletes” instead of under the Russian flag.
According to a new report, Russia has spent the time since this ruling attempting to discredit the 2024 Olympics and strike fear into potential participants and fans who will make the trip to Paris.
The report, compiled by Microsoft’s threat intelligence unit, tracks “prolific Russian influence actors” that began focusing on disparaging the 2024 Olympic Games, including by posting a bogus documentary featuring an AI deepfake of Tom Cruise last summer, according to NBC News.
The Russians have two central objectives, the report states. Those objectives are “to denigrate the reputation of the International Olympic Committee on the world stage and to create the expectation of violence breaking out in Paris during the 2024 Summer Olympic Games.”
The AI-generated “Olympics Has Fallen” documentary is another focal point of the report, as it featured a deepfake of Cruise and fake reviews from the New York Times and Washington Post. The documentary was pulled from YouTube at the International Olympic Committee’s request. Additionally, there were reports of AI-generated news broadcasts stoking fears of terrorism.
Microsoft also noted in the report that “If they cannot participate in or win the Games, then they seek to undercut, defame, and degrade the international competition in the minds of participants, spectators, and global audiences. The Soviet Union boycotted the 1984 Summer Games held in Los Angeles and sought to influence other countries to do the same.”
[NBC News]
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