Minutes after Donald Trump announced in the early hours of Saturday morning that American troops had captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, flooded social media with misinformation about the operation.
Some people shared old videos on social platforms, falsely claiming to have shown the attacks on the Venezuelan capital Caracas. On TikTok, Instagram and X, people shared AI-generated images and videos that purported to show U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents and various law enforcement personnel arresting Maduro.
In recent years, major global incidents have triggered huge amounts of misinformation on social media, with tech companies gave up his efforts to moderate their platforms. Many accounts have sought to take advantage of these lax rules to boost engagement and gain followers.
“The United States of America successfully carried out a large-scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who was, along with his wife, captured and expelled from the country,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social message. job in the early hours of Saturday morning.
Hours later, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that Maduro and his wife had been indicted in the Southern District of New York and charged with narcoterrorism conspiracy, conspiracy to import cocaine, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.
“They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil, in American courts,” Bondi said. wrote on X.
Minutes after Maduro’s arrest was announced, an image purporting to show two DEA agents flanking the Venezuelan president spread widely across multiple platforms.
However, using SynthID, a technology developed by Google deep mind which claims to identify AI-generated images, WIRED was able to confirm that it was likely a fake.
“Based on my analysis, most or all of this image was generated or modified using Google AI,” Google’s Gemini chatbot wrote after analyzing the image shared online. “I detected a SynthID watermark, which is an invisible digital signal embedded by Google’s AI tools during the creation or editing process. This technology is designed to remain detectable even when images are modified, such as by cropping or compression.” The fake image was the first reported by fact-checker David Puente.
Although Grok, X’s AI chatbot, also confirmed that the image was fake at the request of several X users, it falsely claimed that the image was an edited version of the 2017 arrest of Mexican drug kingpin Dámaso López Núñez.
WIRED earlier reported that ChatGPT strongly denied that Maduro was even captured when asked about the event on Saturday morning.
In addition to the likely fake image, some people have used AI tools to create videos from the image purporting to show Maduro’s arrest. On TikTok, multiple examples of these apparently AI-generated videos racked up hundreds of thousands of views within hours of Maduro’s capture. A number of TikTok videos appear to be based on AI-generated images. originally published on Instagram by a digital creator named Ruben Dario and viewed over 12,000 times. Similar videos also appeared on X.
X, Meta and TikTok did not respond to requests for comment.
As has become common following any major global incident, such as the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023 or the American bombing of Iranian nuclear sites Last summer, many disinformation spreaders shared old images claiming they were taken on Saturday in Caracas.
Energetically Laura Loomer, pro-Trump influencer was among dozens of people who shared images showing a removed Maduro poster, writing on » The images were originally taken in 2024. Loomer eventually deleted the post.
Another video purporting to show footage of the US assault on Caracas was posted by an account called “Defense Intelligence” shortly after Trump announced Maduro’s capture, and was viewed on X more than 2 million times. The footage in question was originally posted to TikTok in November 2025.
At the time of publication, the message remains on X.
