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| - False: Viral video showing massive screens was shot in a resort in Korea, not a mall in Beijing
A video showing a large indoor corridor with LED displays covering the ceiling and walls that resembles a massive aquarium went viral in March.
Many internet users who shared the video claimed it was taken at a Beijing shopping mall called “The Place” (世贸天阶).
The clip was widely shared across different platforms. For example, Marc Vidal, a Spanish influencer with over 789,000 followers on YouTube and X, posted the video and said the location was Beijing on X. It has over 912 likes and 210 reposts at the time of writing.
Another tweet with the same video received 5,900 likes and 1,000 reposts, and a post on TikTok gained over a thousand views. A Russian TikTok video also stated it shows a mall in China.
However, those social media posts are misleading.
While The Place in Beijing does have a 250-meter-long outdoor ceiling LED display named Sky Screen above a pedestrian area, the video in question actually shows an indoor structure within a resort in Seoul, South Korea.
The indoor “immersive digital entertainment street” Aurora is found at the Mohegan Inspire Entertainment Resort near the Incheon International Airport. It had its soft opening on Nov. 30, 2023.
Owned by the Korean subsidiary of Mohegan Gaming & Entertainment, an America-based entertainment resort developer, it is listed as one of the attraction venues on its website.
In our investigation, Annie Lab discovered that the same video first went viral in December 2023, after multiple X users began posting it soon after its launch that year.
We can confirm that the video shows the South Korean establishment because the signboards of Hong Pan restaurant and Aurora bar, which are listed on the Inspire resort’s website, are visible in the clip.
The Place Sky Screen in the landmark shopping mall in Beijing, on the other hand, is placed outdoors, covering a 250-meter-long pedestrian walkway.
The Aurora’s LED screens are located indoors, and the aisle spans 150 meters.
This video was also shared with another claim that it shows a location in Russia. A user on Dzen, a Russian blog platform owned by Vkontakte, published an article titled “Palace of impressions in Kazan for 3,000 rubles,” featuring screenshots from the viral clip. Kazan is a city in Russia.
In the process of fact-checking, we also noticed that two X users, with the handles “shivaye01” and “RanodomTheGuy_”, shared the same clip obsessively since February, along with a claim that the location is Beijing.
Annie Lab estimates that shivaye01 alone may have posted it hundreds of times by replying to tweets by different users with many followers. According to their bios and other content, both users are seemingly based in India.
We reached out to them and asked about their intention, but neither of them has replied to us as of this writing.
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