Did The International Olympic Committee plan a vote on moving the 2028 Games out of Los Angeles? No, that's not true: The meme spreading that news originated on a Facebook page with a satire disclaimer and a warning that all the contents of the page are made up.The owner of the page is known for tricking conservatives into liking and sharing made-up content. There were no actual news reports on any such vote.
The story appeared in a June 17, 2025 Facebook post (archived here) on the America Love It Or Leave It page under the title "The International Olympic Committee will vote on moving the 2028 Games from Los Angeles ". It continued:
"for the safety of the athletes and fans alike.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken by Lead Stories.)
The spoof video goes on to include a supposed IOC spokesperson, shown below:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken by Lead Stories.)
The page bio of the America Love It Or Leave It page on Facebook begins with: "A subsidiary of the America's Last Line of Defense network of trollery and propaganda for cash. Nothing on this page is real."
A search for reports including the keywords "Olympic Committee" AND "vote on moving the 2028 Games" did not return any results in Google News' index of thousands of websites.
According to the page transparency tab of the Facebook page that published the meme, it was run by "Busta Troll," which is the nickname of Christopher Blair, a self-professed liberal from Maine who, for years, has run networks of websites set up to troll conservatives. The page publishes made-up news items in order to get conservatives to share his posts.
The "spokesperson" behind the lectern for a portion of the video is the late Joe Barron, a friend of Blair's to whom Blair pays tribute by writing him into stories. Blair's stories have been widely copied by spammy, foreign website networks trying to make a buck by spamming American conservatives with clickbait headlines.
Here you can find some of the many, many stories from Blair's websites Lead Stories debunked over the years.
When fact checkers point out the satire origins of Blair stories to the people liking and sharing these copycat stories some of them get mad at the fact checkers instead of directing their anger at the foreign spammers or the liberal satire writers. Others send a polite "thank you" note, which is much appreciated.
