Within minutes of Donald Trump announcing in the early hours of Saturday morning that US troops had captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, disinformation about the operation flooded social media.
Some people shared old videos across social platforms, falsely claiming that they showed the attacks on the Venezuelan capital Caracas. On TikTok, Instagram, and X, people shared AI-generated images and videos that claimed to show US Drug Enforcement Administration agents and various law enforcement personnel arresting Maduro.
In recent years, major global incidents have triggered huge amounts of disinformation on social media as tech companies have pulled back 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 has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post in the early hours of Saturday morning.
Hours later, US attorney general Pam Bondi announced that Maduro and his wife had been indicted in the Southern District of New York and charged with narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, 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.
Within minutes of the news of Maduro’s arrest breaking, an image claiming to show two DEA agents flanking the Venezuelan president spread widely on multiple platforms.
However, using SynthID, a technology developed by Google DeepMind that claims to identify AI-generated images, WIRED was able to confirm it was likely fake.
“Based on my analysis, most or all of this image was generated or edited using Google AI,” Google’s Gemini chatbot wrote after anaylzing the image being 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 through cropping or compression.” The fake image was first reported by fact checker David Puente.
While X’s AI chatbot Grok also confirmed that the image was fake when asked by several X users, it falsely claimed that the image was an altered version of the arrest of Mexican drug boss Dámaso López Núñez in 2017.