Disinformation Floods Social Media After Nicolás Maduro’s Capture
In the minutes that follow Donald Trump announced on Saturday morning that US troops had captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, as misinformation about the operation flooded social media.
Some people shared old videos on social media, falsely claiming they showed 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 as tech companies have backed away from moderating 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 article 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 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 DeepMind that claims to identify AI-generated images, WIRED was able to confirm that it was likely 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 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.
