#FactCheck- AI-Generated Train Video Falsely Shows Muslims Praying in Japan A video purportedly showing
Executive Summary
Muslims offering prayers inside a crowded train in Japan is being widely shared on social media, amid ongoing discussions around the country’s alleged rise in anti-immigration sentiment. The clip is being presented as a recent and real incident. However, an research reveals that the video is not authentic. Experts noted that the prayer postures shown in the clip do not align with standard Islamic practices, raising doubts about its credibility. Further analysis indicates that the video has been generated using artificial intelligence (AI).
Claim
A user shared the viral video on YouTube, showing a group of men—mostly dressed in long tunics and skullcaps—appearing to offer prayers inside a moving subway train. Passengers can be seen seated on both sides of the carriage. In the clip, two men are kneeling on the floor and bowing their heads onto a small mat placed in front of them, with their heads coming very close to the knees of seated passengers. Another man is seen bending forward at the waist while standing, and a fourth appears to be standing upright with his eyes closed.
- Link: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cZHMCUgbDIA
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Fact Check
A closer examination of the video reveals several visual inconsistencies. One passenger appears to be fused with the seat rails, creating a distorted overlap. Others seem to be seated in areas where seats do not normally exist, such as directly in front of a door. Additionally, an advertisement visible in the background appears blurred and oddly shaped—another common indicator of AI-generated content. An analysis conducted using the Hive Moderation tool found that the video is “likely to contain AI-generated or deepfake content.”
Conclusion
The viral claim is misleading. The video does not depict a real incident in Japan. Instead, it is likely AI-generated content being circulated with a false narrative, misrepresenting both the context and religious practices shown in the clip.
Related Blogs
Executive Summary:
A video is being shared on social media with the claim that a man cut off the electricity supply to his girlfriend’s village after getting angry with her. A research by CyberPeace’s research wing found that the video is actually from Baksa district in Assam, where a lineman named Anwar was repairing an electric line.
Claim:
The viral video is 10 seconds long and shows a man climbing an electricity pole and cutting an electric wire. The video is being shared on social media with the claim that the man cut off the electricity supply to his girlfriend’s entire village after her phone line was busy.
https://www.instagram.com/reels/Dcamn0aGBJ-/
Fact Check:
To investigate the viral claim that a man cut off the electricity supply to his girlfriend’s village after getting angry with her, we conducted a reverse image search using keyframes from the video. During the search, we found the original video uploaded on the YouTube account named ‘Technical Work’ on July 17, 2025. According to the video description, the video is related to electrical work.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iHtG5xwHtKI
Additionally, we found several videos related to electrical work uploaded on the same YouTube account. We also found a Facebook page associated with this YouTube account.
Conclusion
The evidence gathered during our research makes it clear that the viral claim that a man cut off the electricity supply to his girlfriend’s village after getting angry with her is completely false. In reality, the video shows electricity workers repairing a power line in Assam.
A video clip of journalist Palki Sharma is being widely shared on social media. Along with the video, it is being claimed that during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent Middle East visit, she questioned Jordan’s diplomatic protocol.
In the viral clip, Palki Sharma is allegedly seen asking why Jordan’s King Abdullah II did not come to the airport to receive Prime Minister Modi, and whether this indicated a downgrade in the level of welcome.
However, an investigation by the Cyber Peace Foundation found this claim to be misleading. The probe revealed that while the visuals in the viral video are genuine, the audio has been altered using Artificial Intelligence (AI).
On the social media platform ‘X’, a user named “Ammar Solangi” shared this video on 18 December. The post claimed that the video was related to questions raised about Jordan’s diplomatic protocol during Prime Minister Modi’s visit. According to the post, Palki Sharma questioned why King Abdullah II did not receive Prime Minister Modi at the airport. The archive link of the viral post can be seen here: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/26aK0
Verification
During the investigation, the fact-check desk noticed the ‘Firstpost’ logo in the top-left corner of the viral video. Based on this clue, a customized Google search was conducted, which led to the original news report.
The investigation revealed that the viral video was taken from an episode of journalist Palki Sharma’s show “Vantage with Palki Sharma”, which aired on 17 December.
Analysis of the video showed that the visuals appearing at the 33 minutes 30 seconds timestamp in the original report exactly match those used in the viral clip. However, in the original broadcast, Palki Sharma neither questioned Jordan’s protocol nor made any comment about King Abdullah II not being present at the airport.
In the original video, Palki Sharma says:
“Prime Minister Modi was on a diplomatic tour of Jordan, Ethiopia, and Oman, and in Jordan he was received at the airport by the country’s Prime Minister…” The link to the original report can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VYZYe9l6Bs
AI Audio Examination
Further investigation involved separating the audio from the viral video and analyzing it using the AI voice detection tool ‘Resemble AI’. The tool’s results confirmed that fake, AI-generated audio had been added over the real footage in the viral clip to spread a misleading claim. A screenshot of the results from this examination can be seen below.
Conclusion
The video being circulated in the name of journalist Palki Sharma has been tampered with. Her voice has been altered using AI technology, and the claim made regarding the Jordan visit is completely misleading.
Introduction
By the morning of May 19, 2026, many Indians woke up to see a worrying message being circulated on WhatsApp and X (formerly Twitter) stating that the government proposed to appropriate all gold stored in the temples, convert it to cash by some new scheme, and further, regard temple towers, doors, etc., gilded with gold as the "Strategic Gold Reserves of India." The panic spread immediately; religious communities were enraged, and online arguments broke out. By afternoon, the rumour was out of control. The catch was that this whole thing was false.
The Rise of Misinformation: An Old Problem with a New Engine
Misinformation is an ancient phenomenon. Folk scholars have observed for centuries that fabrications, rumours, and hoaxes move through the same channels and follow the same patterns as reliable news, deriving their credibility from repetition rather than proof and relying on social networks for believability.
A seminal 2017 study published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives by Allcott and Gentzkow discovered that fake news articles were far more widely shared than the most popular legitimate news articles in the run-up to the 2016 United States presidential election. The study additionally discovered that nearly 62% of all American adults get at least a fraction of their news through social media, a reality the researchers posited would allow fake news to spread wide and far through unvetted channels.
India is an even more extreme case; on a platform such as WhatsApp, where researcher Kiran Garimella, working for MIT, estimates that 50 billion messages are transmitted every single day in India alone, misinformation is less something that spreads and more something that simply exists.
The Science of Viral Misinformation
The temple gold rumour took a course typical of conspiracy theories. A dramatic, provocative rumour that simultaneously appealed to religious, state, and financial safety was received by an audience already conditioned to mistrust its leaders. In Science, 2018, MIT researchers Vosoughi, Roy, and Aral mapped the very mechanism at scale: it revealed false information to propagate about six times more than true information, reaching about three times as many people. The study further concluded that falsehoods were 70% more likely to be shared than true stories and that the 'engine' of false information spread was not bots and algorithms but humans. The simple reason was that humans prefer something that is novel, surprising, and alarming.
Pariser further elaborated this process within his book Filter Bubble; as algorithms mainly show users what conforms with their existing beliefs, people are put in individual echo chambers, and their tendency to share emotional or falsified content results in corrections often failing to keep up.
The Importance of Fact-Checking and Official Sources
The government reacted to this with a swift and concise response, and an official statement released by the Ministry of Finance on 19 May 2026 cautioned citizens that all legal government policies are declared only through official press releases, government websites, and appropriate agencies and not via social media forwards.
India has a dedicated institutional resource for exactly this purpose. The PIB Fact Check Unit (FCU), established in November 2019 under the Press Information Bureau, has now published over 2,900 fact-checks covering false claims about government policies, schemes, deepfakes, AI-generated content, fabricated notifications, and fraudulent websites. Citizens can submit suspicious content directly to the FCU via WhatsApp (+91 8799711259) or through factcheck.pib.gov.in: The service is free, confidential, and designed to be accessible.
The Risks of Sharing Unverified Information
Beyond confusion and unnecessary anxiety, the spread of unverified information carries concrete risks. Allcott and Gentzkow's research found that individuals who consumed more ideologically homogeneous information were substantially more likely to believe false headlines, a pattern that holds regardless of education or political affiliation.
In India, where WhatsApp research has documented that approximately 13% of images shared in politically active groups constitute known misinformation, the consequences have at times extended well beyond digital confusion.
Advisory for Citizens: Verify, Inoculate, and Share Responsibly
Becoming responsible digital citizens is more than just exercising passive vigilance. An important concept every digital citizen ought to know was formulated by John Cook, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Ullrich Ecker in a 2017 PLOS ONE paper: it is called "prebunking."
Debunking seeks to counter a falsehood once it is believed, while prebunking builds resilience in advance of the exposure, similar to how a vaccine inoculates the body to protect against a disease. Prebunking is implemented through an inoculation technique wherein individuals are warned about the presence of likely future misinformation, about the subject and the typical manipulative tactics that the misinformation may use. Exposure, even in an attenuated form, arms individuals with the wherewithal to recognise and disregard the actual misinformation once it appears. What this means in practice is that informed, aware citizens, capable of analysing how misinformation is crafted, are unlikely to fall for a new rumour of this nature.
What should be kept in mind?
- Wait before sharing: A prompt sense of fear, anger, or desire to share a post is not a call to immediate dissemination but an exercise in caution.
- Prebunk yourself and others: Be mindful of subjects that persistently generate falsehoods like government schemes, religious matters, economic policy, and national security.
- Refer to official sources only: The authenticity of claims related to any government scheme can be cross-checked on PIB.gov.in, relevant ministries, or the PIB Fact Check WhatsApp number, 8799711259.
- Identify filter bubbles: Repeated confirmation of your own beliefs and concerns indicates an algorithmic bubble.
- Do not amplify ambiguity: Circulating information merely as a matter of cautious verification has damaging repercussions.
- Rectify what has been shared: Issue the correction to the same recipients as the false information.
Conclusion
The swift clarifications issued by the government in May 2026 and fact-check systems by PIB have helped contain the panic, but the role of the government cannot be seen as the sole bulwark against misinformation. An informed citizenry, digitally and information literate to such an extent that they know how misinformation is created and circulated, is our strongest defence against fake news. It is not only the ability to fact-check but also to detect manipulative attempts before misinformation goes viral. Check before you share. Stop before you panic. When in doubt, check the PIB Fact Check.
References
[3] https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2247720
[4] Allcott, Hunt and Matthew Gentzkow. (2017). "Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election." Journal of Economic Perspectives 31(2): 211–23
[5] Vosoughi, Soroush, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral. (2018). "The Spread of True and False News Online." Science 359(6380): 1146–1151
[6] Cook, John, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Ullrich K. H. Ecker. (2017). "Neutralizing misinformation through inoculation: Exposing misleading argumentation techniques reduces their influence." PLOS ONE 12(5): e0175799.
[7] Garimella, Kiran and Dean Eckles. (2020/2023). "Images and Misinformation in Political Groups: Evidence from WhatsApp in India.
[8] Christakis, Nicholas A. and James H. Fowler. (2011). Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.
[9] Pariser, Eli. (2011/2012). The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You.
