This has got to be the most moronic story of the month. It's genuinely so stupid it frankly boggles the mind. It was broken by Norwegian daily "Dagens Næringsliv" (DN) under the title "Chinese-owned rental cars filmed secret exercise: Saved video of soldiers and codes" (dn.no/forsvar-og-sikkerhet/k…). BUT when you look into the story what actually happened is that, for an exercise, the Norwegian army was short on cars so it rented some from Hertz. Those rental cars had dashcams - as cars do - that the soldiers mistakenly kept on. At one point, some soldiers found out about that: they were clicking through the car menus out of boredom and stumbled on the footage, including clips of themselves typing gate codes in front of the camera. They deleted the footage. There is zero evidence the footage left the car. THAT'S IT, that's the whole story. China hysteria being what it is in Europe these days, this somehow got transformed into a "China spying" story because Hertz Norway is owned by Volvo, itself owned by Geely (a Chinese company), and 2 of the cars were from a Chinese brand, Deepal. The narrative apparently being that Geely, through Volvo, through Hertz, deliberately left standard dashcams on in rental cars in the hope that the Norwegian military would one day rent them and forget to turn the dashcams off 🤦 And now, as is always the case, it's being spread globally by accounts like Clash Report 👇, which even found a way to make the story dumber: their version has the cars as "Chinese-owned Volvos", when they weren’t Volvos at all. Such is the contemporary media ecosystem: one outlet invents the hysteria, the next one strips away the last remaining nuance and we all end up dumber for it.