"Japan's nuclear wastewater -- real incident," reads the Chinese-language caption of a false post uploaded to short-video platform Douyin on August 27, 2023.
The accompanying image shows dark liquid flowing from a building into a body of water.
A second image in the post, showing dark discharge flowing into the sea, has been debunked by AFP here and shows sewage spilling into Mexico's Acapulco Bay.
Japan's release of more than 500 Olympic swimming pools' worth of treated radioactive water into the Pacific began on August 24, and has since unleashed a wave of misinformation in China and neighbouring Korea.
Beijing has condemned the plan and banned all seafood imports from Japan, despite reassurances from both Japanese authorities and the UN nuclear watchdog.
The same image has been shared with similar false claims in other Douyin posts, as well as on TikTok, Chinese video site Bilibili, along with content-sharing sites Baijiahao and NetEase.
However, reverse image searches for the photo on Google followed by keyword searches found it was in fact captured in China.
The image corresponds to a ...
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