"This video has been misconstrued by certain people online who are intent on stoking the flames and stirring up a toxic panic […] When the video was filmed, I had no idea that there was a virus (...). The bats that you see in the video were raised by local people; they weren’t wild. People eat bats in many different countries across the globe (...) ", Weng Mengyun wrote on Weibo Jan. 22, 2020.

“@wuhan @coronavirus is spreads [sic] through family’s chinese bat soup”, reads the caption on this video posted on YouTube on January 23, which has since garnered more than 40,000 views. The video shows a young woman holding a cooked bat in her hands before ripping it apart and eating it with a friend.The video was also circulated on other sites and garnered hundreds of thousands of views . Many of the posts were followed by a flurry of hateful comments. “It makes sense that they have coronavirus,” wrote one person on social media. “They eat everything except stone and wood.”However, our team flagged a few details in the video that raised doubts on the claims that the video was filmed in Wuhan. For example, at the end of the video, there is a scene showing a group of women dancing next to a pillar with the name “Lighthouse Palau” written on it.We searched for “Lighthouse Palau” in Google and quickly came across a hotel with the same name and a similar logo located in the island nation of Palau in the Pacific Ocean.The young woman who features in this video is Weng Mengyun, a well-known Chinese influencer who often hosts travel shows. Weng took to the network Weibo on January 22 to respond to the wide circulation of the video. In her post, she apologised to anyone who was shocked by her video and said that she should have mentioned that there are health risks to eating bat meat. She said she had filmed the video in 2016 in Palau, and posted it online in 2016 or 2017. She said she was angry that the video had been associated with the coronavirus outbreak.The manager of a restaurant in Palau said that he recognised the restaurant shown in this video and that it was called CC Taiyo.Weng’s post was widely cited by international media but there was quite a lot of confusion about it. Articles published by News Australia Foreign Policy and the Sun shared excerpts from her post along with the wrong video [see below], which shows another Chinese woman eating a soup made out of bat meat.