Venezuela misinformation spreads like wildfire online

When Donald Trump ran to be president again in 2024, he did so on a platform of ‘no more foreign interventions’. Now that Trump has straight-up invaded a foreign country, Venezuela, and kidnapped their president, his supporters are having to excuse the sudden shift. In part, they’re achieving this by pushing misinformation and AI slop, which suggests the Venezuelans are all pro-Trump:

29k retweets on this fake AI video

We're cooked, soon only a small minority will distinguish reality from AI and we will be fighting with digital illiterates over the authenticity of videos https://t.co/jYdGK53BvM

— Middle East Observer (@ME_Observer_) January 4, 2026

Venezuela slopaganda

One of the people sharing misinformation is the right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley. Shirley became famous recently after he published a YouTube documentary on fraud which took place in Minnesota daycare centres that cater to the state’s Somali population. While there is documented fraud in Minnesota, Shirley’s documentary was criticised for its poor journalistic standards, and Shirley’s obvious attempts to smear ordinary Somali Americans.

The following is a fact which didn’t make it into his ‘documentary’:

This is Aimee Bock, the former executive director of Feeding Our Future, and the ringleader of the fraud in Minnesota.

Does she look Somalian to you? pic.twitter.com/TwYLzlHpHN

— Machine Pun Kelly 🇺🇦 (@KellyScaletta) December 29, 2025

It really has to be seen to be believed, but Shirley was turning up at these daycare centres wearing sunglasses and a microphone. With a crew of men behind him – some of them masked – Shirley alternated between saying he wanted to enroll ‘our son, little Joey’, and demanding to ‘see the children’. Shirley suggested it was strange that the staff in these facilities refused to let him into their buildings.

Shirley also criticised the facilities for having locked doors and no windows. When an actual reporter told him this was to prevent paedophiles barging in, Shirley acknowledged that this was a ‘good point’.

Shirley is literally one of the stupidest people to have ever wielded a camera, and now he’s doing Venezuela misinformation.

Nick Shirley's rise to fame is proof meritocracy does not exists. https://t.co/ZYVJCZ98U5

— JimmyTheGiant (@jimthegiant) January 4, 2026

The other big account doing misinformation is the misinformation machine himself, Alex Jones:

“Anti-DeepState” Alex Jones spreading deep state propaganda. https://t.co/hm25Tv09W7 pic.twitter.com/hOnXz6su5D

— GenXGirl (@GenXGirl1994) January 4, 2026

Little-known fact, but they call it the ‘deep state’ because Jones is so deep up their sphincter that he and FBI head Kash Patel share chewing gum.

There are some other notable freaks getting in on it too, including a second infamous conspiracist:

Why are so many MAGA accounts posting old videos or AI slop about Venezuela? The lies they tell themselves is sad. https://t.co/txeEc0wCWN

— 𝓐𝓷𝓪𝓼𝓽𝓪𝓼𝓲𝓪 𝓜𝓸𝓻𝓷𝓲𝓷𝓰𝓼𝓽𝓪𝓻 ★ (@sistercc52) January 4, 2026

Trump pardoned D’souza for campaign finance law violations in 2018, so you could consider the above to be him returning the favour.

There’s much, much more too:

This is clearly, obviously Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Ever since Elon got nuked the blue check and started paying people for clicks, low effort fake news farms have proliferated. He's almost single-handedly made our media ecosystem tangibly worse. https://t.co/ExOL1f8uT2

— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) January 4, 2026

Fanfiction

To be fair, there are no doubt going to be Venezuelans who are glad to see the back of Maduro – especially among the expat communities. There were Iraqis who were glad to see the back of Saddam Hussein too, and Libyans who were glad to see the back of Muammar Gaddafi. As we all know, the problem is that there is no clean way of toppling a country’s ruling party.

Perhaps Venezuela will prove to be the exception to the rule; perhaps it will turn into the next Iraq. We can’t say either way, but we can say that sharing AI fan fiction helps nobody except the oil executives who are eyeing up Venezuela’s reserves.

Featured image via AI