within minutes President Donald Trump announced early Saturday that U.S. forces had captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Syria Flores, and misinformation about the operation flooded social media.
Some people shared old videos on social platforms falsely claiming to show the attack on Venezuela's capital, Caracas. TikTok, Instagram, and X shared AI-generated images and videos purporting to show U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents and various law enforcement officials arresting Maduro.
In recent years, major global incidents have sparked a deluge of misinformation on social media, as tech companies roll back efforts to moderate their platforms. Many accounts try to take advantage of these loose rules to increase engagement and gain followers.
“The United States has successfully launched a major attack on Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been captured and exiled along with his wife,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social early Saturday morning.
Hours later, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the Maduros had been indicted in the Southern District of New York on charges of narco-terrorism conspiracy, conspiracy to import cocaine, possession of a machine gun and a destructive device, and conspiracy to possess a machine gun and a destructive device.
“They will soon face the full wrath of the American judiciary on American soil and in American courts,” Bondi wrote to X.
Within minutes of news of Maduro's arrest breaking, images purporting to show two DEA agents flanking the Venezuelan president were widely circulated on multiple platforms.
However, by 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.
After analyzing images shared online, Google's Gemini chatbot wrote, “According to my analysis, most or all of this image was generated or edited using Google AI.” “We'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 if the image has been altered, such as by cropping or compression.” Fact checker David Puente was the first to report the fake image.
X's AI chatbot Grok also admitted the image was fake in response to questions from several X users, but falsely claimed that the image was a modified version of the 2017 arrest of Mexican drug boss Damaso López Nuñez.
