Disinformation Floods Social Media After Trump’s Maduro Capture Announcement

Just minutes after former US President Donald Trump shared an early Saturday morning announcement claiming US forces had captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, false information about the purported operation spread like wildfire across social media platforms.

Many users reposted outdated footage across major social networks, falsely labeling the old clips as new footage of strikes on Venezuela’s capital city of Caracas. Across TikTok, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter), users also circulated AI-created images and videos that purported to show US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents and other law enforcement officers taking Maduro into custody.

Over the past several years, high-stakes global events have consistently sparked massive waves of disinformation on social media, a trend that has grown as large tech firms have scaled back their content moderation work. A wide range of accounts have exploited these looser content policies to rack up engagement and grow their follower bases.

In his early Saturday post on Truth Social, Trump wrote: “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.”

A few hours after Trump’s post, US Attorney General Pam Bondi confirmed that Maduro and his wife had been indicted by a court in the Southern District of New York. The pair face a slew of charges including narco-terrorism conspiracy, conspiracy to import cocaine, illegal possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess the unregistered weapons.

“They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts,” Bondi wrote on X.

Just minutes after news of the supposed arrest broke, one image purporting to show two DEA agents standing on either side of Maduro went viral across multiple social platforms. But when WIRED tested the image using SynthID — a tool built by Google DeepMind designed to detect AI-generated imagery — the outlet confirmed the image was almost certainly fabricated.

After analyzing the widely shared image, Google’s Gemini chatbot stated: “Based on my analysis, most or all of this image was generated or edited using Google AI. 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.” Fact-checker David Puente was the first to flag the fake image publicly.

X’s own AI chatbot Grok also confirmed the image was fake when queried by multiple X users, though it incorrectly claimed the image was a doctored version of 2017 footage showing the arrest of Mexican drug kingpin Dámaso López Núñez. WIRED also previously noted that when asked about the event on Saturday morning, OpenAI’s ChatGPT firmly rejected the claim that Maduro had actually been taken into custody at all.

Beyond the viral fake image, bad actors have also used AI tools to turn the fabricated still into short videos that claim to show Maduro’s arrest. On TikTok, multiple instances of these AI-generated clips gained hundreds of thousands of views just hours after Trump’s initial announcement. Many of the TikTok videos draw from AI-generated images originally shared to Instagram by a digital creator named Ruben Dario, which have already been viewed more than 12,000 times on that platform. Comparable fake videos have also circulated widely on X.

All three major platforms — X, Meta (which owns Instagram), and TikTok — declined to respond to requests for comment on the spread of disinformation across their services.

As is now standard following any high-profile global event — from the October 2023 outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war to US airstrikes on Iranian nuclear sites last summer — disinformation purveyors also dug up old footage to pass off as new footage from Caracas taken on Saturday.

Outspoken pro-Trump influencer Laura Loomer was one of dozens of accounts that shared old footage showing a Maduro poster being removed. On X, she wrote: “Following the capture of Maduro by US Special Forces earlier this morning, the people of Venezuela are ripping down posters of Maduro and taking to the streets to celebrate his arrest by the Trump administration.” The clip she shared was actually filmed back in 2024, and Loomer ultimately took the post down after the misinformation was exposed.

A second fake video, claiming to show US military assaults on Caracas, was posted by an account named “Defense Intelligence” just moments after Trump’s initial announcement. The clip has been viewed more than 2 million times on X, though the footage was originally uploaded to TikTok back in November 2025. At the time of this publication, the post remains live on X.