Did China attack Taiwan? Channel apologises after airing false news

A Taiwan government-backed news channel had to apologise on Wednesday after mistakenly reporting that China had attacked its capital Taipei.

Chinese Television System's news captions on Wednesday showed alerts that Taipei's military infrastructure had been hit by Chinese missiles. The captions also mentioned that Chinese agents had set a train station on fire and that Taiwan's president had declared emergency.

The channel later apologised and clarified that the captions were meant for a drill with the fire department in New Taipei city a day before but were mistakenly displayed on Wednesday morning due to technical issues.

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Screenshots of the mock captions quickly became viral on social media with some reprimanding the channel for bad journalism while others made light of the error.