Viral posts claiming that there is a video of a mosque being torn down in China have been circulating on X, sparking an array of responses – from inflammatory comments about religion to harsh critiques of China. One of the most viewed posts further claims that “China officially considers Islam a mental illness,” while another post claims that Chinese intelligence services found “banned literature” in the mosque which led to its destruction.
While some posts situate this mosque in Chengdu, China, the video does not hold up to closer scrutiny. For one, a reverse search of screengrabs from the claim video led us to a large number of Indonesian sources and articles. Clearly visible in images and videos from these sources is the “mosque” pictured in the claim – standing alongside what appear to be other re-creations of cultural structures such as St. Basil’s Cathedral and European-style castles.
Reading the translated articles, it becomes apparent that the “mosque” is actually part of a theme park in West Java, Indonesia called the Hibiscus Fantasy. After recently being blamed for triggering environmental issues such as flash floods, the park was sealed by the governor of West Java, with demolition beginning on 6th March.
Videos taken by spectators of the demolition appear to have been clipped by malicious parties and re-captioned to intentionally mislead audiences and stir up heated responses about mosques and Islam. The inclusion of “context” such as China making Islam a mental illness, or banned literature found in the mosque is, therefore, also fabricated as the mosque in question does not exist. We therefore give this claim a rating of false.
While China has been criticised and accused by organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch of serious crimes against humanity when it comes to its Muslim population – particularly the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang – it has consistently denounced these accusations. However, claims such as this one leverage these existing tensions to incite inflammatory reactions, which can be seen across the comments and responses to the viral posts.
In countries with a range of religious cultures (such as Singapore), the cohesion of these groups is a delicate balance that is highly vulnerable to religious disinformation – particularly examples such as this which appear to have a specific and targeted agenda. Being vigilant about debunking and exposing these attempts is an important part of keeping such disinformation campaigns in check.
However, we also noticed something else about this claim as it spread on X.
In November 2023, X’s AI chatbot, Grok, was introduced on the platform. It’s most recent update, Grok-3, can be used by X users to answer questions, summarise posts, and even generate their own posts. While looking through responses to the viral claim posts, we noticed some X users asking Grok in the comments for clarification about the mosque demolition.It its answer, Grok appears to further the spread of disinformation – describing the video as showing “the demolition of the mosque, likely in China” with some further context about Islam in China. While the AI likely based its answer on what it could scrape from across X, the internet, and its own database of knowledge, this represents a worrying potential for the state of fact-checking on social media.
With more and more users turning to AI Chatbots as search engines or to verify information, these chatbots delivering false information is a real and present danger. What happens when users rely on AI for fact-checks without performing more critical research by themselves? Might bad actors leverage this to push the spread of mis/disinformation on a large scale? This also highlights that we cannot, as yet, fully place our trust in the word of AI chatbots – not for basic information and even less so for fact-checking.
