Old AI video falsely linked to Venezuela earthquakes
- Published on July 2, 2026 at 20:51
- 2 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
Back-to-back earthquakes of magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5 shattered neighborhoods in Venezuela on June 24, 2026. But a video claimed to show one structure in the country swaying violently without crumbling is a fabrication, generated by artificial intelligence, that has circulated online since late 2025.
"WOW!!!! Prayers for Venezuela," says a June 28, 2026 post sharing the clip on X.
Text over the visual -- which has spread across X and also appears on Facebook and YouTube -- reads: "Earthquake cctv."
The video circulated after massive twin earthquakes devastated Venezuela on June 24, wiping out buildings and leaving rescuers scrambling to locate survivors trapped beneath the rubble as the death toll mounted.
With tens of thousands of people still unaccounted for, the majority of collapsed buildings in the hardest-hit city of La Guaira were marked by July 1 with the letter "D" for "deceased," a sign they had been searched with no signs of life found.
The quakes likely damaged or destroyed 58,870 buildings, according to a preliminary assessment of satellite data published by NASA.
However, the clip of a building lurching back and forth is unrelated to the tremors -- and fabricated.
Reverse image searches surfaced the same video on TikTok, where it was posted December 15, 2025, more than six months before the earthquakes struck Venezuela (archived here). The clip is similarly timestamped "2025/12/15."
"Earthquake cctv #cctv #earthquake #japan #austrila," the caption reads.
The account's page includes many videos that TikTok or the creator labeled as containing AI-generated media (archived here).
The InVid-WeVerify toolkit found evidence that various keyframes of the supposed earthquake video were synthetic, and the Hive Moderation AI detection tool found portions of the video itself to be AI-generated.
The clip also features several visual anomalies typical of AI-generated content, including illegible text resembling Chinese and Korean on signs and road markings, and inconsistent spacing between the intersection's different crosswalks.
While it purports to be CCTV footage, the video also does not show the camera itself shaking, and the adjacent convenience store and cars parked along the street remain still even as other buildings and pylons sway violently.
AFP previously debunked similar posts, in both English and Spanish, that misrepresented the same video as footage of various earthquakes in Japan.
AFP has fact-checked other misinformation about Venezuela here.
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