The clip looked like the sort of thing that makes your stomach drop: a dense crowd surging down a street, flags waving, banners lifted high, chants rolling like thunder. It was posted as 'proof' that people in China had poured out to demand justice for Yu Menglong. And it traveled fast because grief is an accelerant, and the internet loves nothing more than a ready-made crowd.
But the video was not a protest at all. AFP later reported that it carried the watermark of 'Sora' (an OpenAI tool), along with telltale distortions, gibberish characters on signs, and warped faces — classic signs of synthetic footage. A snapshot of the Yu Menglong story outside China is this: a real death, a sealed-off information space and an overseas audience attempting to build certainty from fragments, rumours and, now, machine-made imagery.
