Disinformation Floods Social Media After Nicolás Maduro’s Capture

Within minutes of Donald Trump announced in the early hours of Saturday morning that US forces had arrested Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores, and misinformation about the operation flooded social media.

Some people circulated old video clips on social media platforms, falsely claiming that they showed the attacks on the Venezuelan capital, Caracas. On TikTok, Instagram, and

In recent years, major global events have sparked massive amounts of misinformation on social media, as tech companies roll 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 successfully carried out a large-scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who was arrested with his wife and flown out of the country,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social in the early hours of Saturday morning.

Hours later, US Attorney Pam Bondi announced that Maduro and his wife had been indicted in the Southern District of New York and charged with terrorism and narcotics 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.

Within minutes of news of Maduro’s arrest emerging, a photo purporting to show two DEA agents escorting the Venezuelan president went viral.

However, using SynthID, a technology developed by Google DeepMind that claims to recognize images generated by artificial intelligence, WIRED was able to confirm that they were most likely fake.

“Based on my analysis, most or all of this image was created or edited using Google AI,” Google’s Gemini chatbot wrote after analyzing the image being shared online. “You’ve detected a SynthID watermark, 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 cropping or compressing.” The fake photo was first reported by fact-checker David Puente.

While X’s chatbot Grok also confirmed that the photo was fake when asked by several X users, it falsely claimed that the photo was an edited version of the 2017 arrest of Mexican drug lord Damaso Lopez Nunez.