Olympic Games: Paris 2024 animates social networks

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Paris 2024 on social networks: will the flame soon be stronger than the controversy?

With less than 100 days to go until the Olympic Games, Image 7 (communications consultancy) and Visibrain (social listening tool) are launching the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games barometer, as seen through the eyes of social networks. The aim: to track the major trends in online conversations on the various platforms and their evolution, before and during the competition.

The departure of the flame: the most commented topic on X in April 2024

Unsurprisingly, the lighting of the flame and its departure from Olympia generated a spike in conversations on social networks on April 16, particularly on X (84,694 tweets), where Laure Manaudou's presence as torchbearer was widely commented on. On Saturday April 27, the departure of the "Belem" for Marseille was also widely relayed.

In all, there were 85,000 mentions of the flame on X over the past month.

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The opening ceremony and the security issues surrounding it (terrorist threat, among others) top the list, ahead of the quality of the water in the Seine, a matter of great concern to Internet users, many of whom mocked the river's recent flooding.

The controversy surrounding Aya Nakamura's participation in the celebrations persists, as does that of influencer Baptiste Moirot, who will not be taking part in the torch relay due to allegations of sexual assault.

Restricted areas and transport problems were also evident in the X exchanges, with the corollary, albeit to a lesser extent, of worries about possible strikes, particularly on the SNCF.

On a lighter note, the fall of diver Alexis Jandard at the inauguration of the Olympic pool earlier this month also caused a stir.

Nearly 3 million posts in April: Paris 2024 less visible than Tokyo 2020, but more than Rio 2016 in the same period

With less than 100 days to go until the games, thanks to data aggregated by Visibrain, we were able to measure the volume of conversations in the run-up to the competition. In April 2024, the Paris Olympics generated 2.8 million posts, across all platforms. That's fewer than for Tokyo (6.5 million), but more than Rio 2016 in the same period (2 million). The difference with Tokyo is mainly explained by the COVID context, still very marked in spring 2021 (as a reminder, the Olympics had been postponed by a year), a period during which a large part of the world was still fighting the pandemic, making Tokyo 2020 an unusual edition... At the time, there was even the question of whether the Tokyo Games should continue or whether the public should be present in the stands, and exchanges were particularly intense on social networks.

TikTok and Instagram: the social networks that engage most with the 2024 Olympics

Another finding of this first edition of the Image 7 / Visibrain barometer is that it is on TikTok and Instagram that web users interact the most with content relating to the Paris Olympics. The power of these two platforms is confirmed: with over 20 million interactions each, they are neck and neck, and far outstrip their competitors on this engagement criterion:

On TikTok, politics (also) invites itself to the Paris Olympics

Shared by the "patriosphere" account france.avenir, the sequence extracted from a speech by the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs on the subject of the cross on the dome of the Invalides is the French-language content that is causing the most reaction on TikTok in April on the subject of the Olympics. In the run-up to the European elections, the echo of this video reinforces the observation that activist communities on the app are very active around the Olympics, in an attempt to turn them into a political issue.

On Instagram, almost-qualified Indonesia celebrate their victory over South Korea

Indonesia's Under-23 national team is on the verge of securing a place at the 2024 Paris Olympics after the team qualified for the semi-finals of the Under-23 Asian Cup, which also serves as a qualifying tournament for the Games. The official Instagram account of President of the Republic of Indonesia Joko Widodo garners over 1.2 million likes with this post:

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