Footage from a Chinese flood zone showing militia eating boxed lunches while standing in muddy water spread in Japan, where posters picked apart why anyone would film it that way. In the same stretch of days X said it had identified and removed a China-linked bot farm of roughly 200,000 accounts, of which about 200 were described as posting on US AI and energy policy. How the lunch clip came to be filmed is not established.
Videos said to show Shenyang streets flooding into a 'giant aquarium' with fish swimming past storefronts, and a collapsed parking-garage retaining wall spilling out construction waste, fed familiar Japanese mockery of Chinese infrastructure — though none of the footage could be traced to primary news reporting. Meanwhile, a visiting YouTuber's claim that a Kyoto restaurant charges foreigners higher prices backfired after viewers noted the video never compared identical menu items, and the restaurant's online reviews were flooded with hostile ratings. Japanese comments mixed scorn for shoddy construction with anger at the unverified accusation — and some argued Japan should simply make dual pricing official.