Venezuela earthquakes: old footage and AI fakes exploit disaster online
Following twin earthquakes in Venezuela, social media has been flooded with misleading videos, including recycled footage from other countries, old clips presented as current, and AI-generated videos falsely claiming to show the devastation.
As rescue efforts continue in Venezuela after the twin earthquakes struck, social media has been flooded with misleading videos falsely claiming to show the devastation. One widely shared clip, viewed hundreds of thousands of times, appears to show a white apartment building collapsing. A reverse image search traced it to Turkey, where it was published by Turkish news outlets in October 2023, documenting the controlled demolition of a damaged building in Kahramanmaraş. Google Street View imagery from 2022 shows the building still standing, while 2025 imagery confirms its demolition.
Another video falsely claims to show an explosion in the Caracas Metro triggered by the earthquakes. The footage shows passengers scrambling from a train onto the platform. While genuinely filmed in Caracas, it dates back to September 2021, when Spanish-language media reported an electrical system failure at Los Dos Caminos station.
Artificial intelligence adds a new layer: a viral video on X, viewed millions of times, claims to show two high-rise towers swaying and collapsing during the earthquakes. The footage is AI-generated, with buildings bending unrealistically, surrounding objects failing to react naturally, and debris consisting of repetitive, uniform fragments.
These three dominant forms of visual misinformation—recycled footage from other countries, old videos presented as current, and AI-generated content designed to farm engagement—are now a textbook example of how disinformation spreads during major disasters.
