Rumors alleging Chinese involvement in Indonesia's post-election unrest have spiked on social media. 

Fact-checkers said hoaxes and calls for violence on social media have intensified. Indonesian authorities have announced social media restrictions, including limits on the ability to share or upload photos and videos, Reuters reported. 

On Friday, Indonesian police arrested a man accused of creating a campaign to spread anti-Chinese disinformation to incite racial hatred. 

The man reportedly used a photo of three Indonesian police officers at protests last week with a caption saying the officers are Chinese soldiers based on their "slanted eyes." 

"We are real Indonesian mobile brigade police. We are not Chinese officers," one of the officers said at a press conference on Friday. 

Clashes broke out between Indonesian security forces and protesters last week after poll results showed President Joko Widodo defeating Prabowo Subianto. Eight people have been killed and more than 700 hurt in the unrest. 

The unrest and the anti-Chinese sentiment on social media are worrying Chinese Indonesians, some of whom have reportedly taken precautionary measures.

It has also caused the country heavy economic losses. Vietnam Plus reported that Indonesia businesses lost an estimated $6.9 million to $103.7 million due to post-election unrest. 

In addition to the photo identifying the Indonesia police officers as Chinese, there was also another popular video on social media, purported to show the siege of a mosque by Chinese police in Indonesia. Authorities later confirmed that there was no such incident. Fact checkers found out that the video was faked by splicing together unrelated footage, Reuters reported.

The same Reuters report also found that a significant portion of misinformation published during the election focused on stoking ethnic and religious divides, while depicting electoral agencies as corrupt, frequently using China as a bogeyman.

Other media reports showed that the rumor against China started even before the elections. 

At the start of 2019, some people spread a rumor that officials had found seven containers with punched ballots shipped from China to Indonesia. The ballots, the rumor said, were cast for Widodo and his running mate. 

An investigation later showed that the rumor was false and that there were no such containers with ballots. But by then, the rumor had been retweeted more than 17,000 times, digital news magazine Ozy reported. 

During the general election, Subianto criticized the country's trade policy with China and Chinese infrastructure investment in Indonesia. But Widodo made infrastructure development an important part of his re-election campaign. And China is crucial to this success.

"Prabowo [seeks] to diminish Widodo's initiatives, including Chinese investment in Indonesia and the growing presence of Chinese organizations and workers and the Sino-Indonesian joint projects," Lindsay Hughes, a research analyst at the think tank Future Directions International, told Ozy. 

According to media reports, the Indonesian government has launched a new state-run anti-hoax "war room" to counter the influence of fake propaganda.