It really happens more often than you think. Social credit score is probably the biggest outright fabrication about China but there's a lot of big misconceptions, like:

• Thinking China somehow is oppressing Tibetans (only partly true in the sense they oppressed Tibetan slaveowners) or the whole Uyghur Genocide lie, I think Western govs have stopped pushing the Uyghur stuff but a lot of people still think there's a million Uyghurs locked up in detention camps even after years of travel vloggers going to Xinjiang and showing how active it is with cultural activities, traditional and modern Uyghur architecture, festivals, etc.
• Not knowing the history of the Chinese Nationalists in the Chinese Civil War, how the KMT and Chiang Kai Shek especially played a role in creating Taiwan. A lot of people seem to think that Taiwan is some kind of independent country that China randomly laid claim to, not another government that claims to control all of China because they lost the civil war.
• Misunderstanding of their whole political system, in a bunch of ways. Lots of people think China is a country where people don't vote or have any input over how the government runs. The truth is that the CPC is way more receptive to input from the local, regional, and national bodies that govern it. It's a system that's closer to a direct democracy (granted, with a lot of intermediary bureaucracies) than Western liberal democracies where many national bodies are decoupled from regional and local governance.