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• Falsehoods about who started Friday's Ukrainian nuclear plant fire are rife on Chinese social media.
• Chinese tech firms say they want to provide accurate news, but must balance this with the state's support for Russia.
• Experts told Insider that these companies have to follow where the political winds blow in China.

In the hours after a fire was reported close to Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant last Friday, China's Twitter-like service Weibo lit up with comments.

Responding to news reports shared to China's state-run media Weibo accounts, users expressed were quick to blame the perceived perpetrator: Ukraine.

"Self-directed, self-produced?" a user asked in the comments section in the first minute after Global Times' initial post on Weibo about the fire.

Another wrote: "Could it be them setting it on fire themselves?"

This last post, made two days after the incident, came after outlets on the ground such as AP reported, and the Ukrainian government stated, that Russian forces had shelled the plant, setting a building on fire. Moscow, on the other hand, sowed confusion by claiming Ukrainian perpetrators had set the building alight.

It can be difficult to verify information in the first hours after a fast-moving news development.

But within the highly-regulated confines of China's cyberspace, the continued existence of false claims — long after they've been...

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