Minutes after Donald Trump announced a “large-scale strike” against Venezuela early on Saturday morning, false and misleading AI-generated images began flooding social media. There were fake photos of Nicolás Maduro being escorted off a plane by US law enforcement agents, images of jubilant Venezuelans pouring into the streets of Caracas and videos of missiles raining down on the city – all fake.
The fabricated content intermixed with real videos and photos of US aircraft flying over the Venezuelan capital and explosions lighting up the dark sky. A lack of verified information about the raid coupled with AI tools’ rapidly advancing capabilities made discerning fact from fiction about the incursion on Caracas difficult.
By the time Trump posted a verified photo of Maduro blindfolded, handcuffed and dressed in grey sweatpants aboard the USS Iwo Jima warship, the fake images with the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents had already gone viral. Across X, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, the AI photos have been seen and shared millions of times, according to the factchecking site NewsGuard.
Vince Lago, the mayor of Coral Gables, Florida, posted the fake photo of Maduro being escorted by the DEA agents to Instagram, saying that the Venezuelan president “is the leader of a narco-terrorist organization threatening our country”. Lago’s post received more than 1500 likes and is still up as of this writing.
Tools for detecting manipulated content, such as reverse image search and AI-detection sites, can help assess whether online images are accurate, but they are inconsistent. Sofia Rubinson, a senior editor who studies misinformation and conspiracy theories for NewsGuard, told the Guardian that the fake images of Caracas are similar to actual events, which makes it even more difficult to figure out what is real.
“Many of the AI-generated and out-of-context visuals that are currently flooding social media do not drastically distort the facts on the ground,” Rubinson said. “Still, the use of AI-generated fabrications and dramatic, out-of-context footage is being used to fill gaps in real-time reporting and represents another tactic in the misinformation wars – and one that is harder for fact checkers to expose because the visuals often approximate reality.”
NewsGuard released a report on Monday afternoon that identified five fabricated and out-of-context photos as well as two videos of the military operation in Venezuela. One AI-generated photo shows a soldier posing next to Maduro, who has a black hood over his head. An out-of-context video shows a US special forces helicopter descending on a supposed Venezuelan military site – the actual footage was taken in June at the Fort Bragg army base in North Carolina.
NewsGuard said the seven misleading photos and videos it identified have now garnered more than 14m views on X alone.
Other footage from past events is also being circulated online and passed off as part of Saturday’s strike. Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer and Trump confidant, posted footage of a poster of the Venezuelan president on X saying that “the people of Venezuela are ripping down posters of Maduro”. According to Wired, the footage is from 2024. Loomer has since removed the post.
Another rightwing influencer and conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, posted on X an aerial video of thousands of people cheering in Caracas. “Millions of Venezuelans flooded the streets of Caracas and other major cities in celebration of the ouster of Communist dictator Nicholas Maduro,” Jones wrote. “Now we need to see the same type of energy here on the HomeFront!”
The video, which is still up, has reached more than 2.2m views. Comments on the post from Community Notes, X’s crowdsource moderation tool, say that the video is “at least 18 months old”. A reverse image search of the video shows that the footage is actually from a protest in Caracas after Maduro’s disputed presidential win in July 2024.
Grok, the platform’s AI chatbot, also disputes the timeline of Jones’ video, saying: “Current sources show no such celebrations in Caracas today, but pro-Maduro gatherings instead.”
Meta, X and TikTok did not respond to requests for comment.
