As rescue efforts continue following Venezuela’s devastating twin earthquakes, social media has been flooded with viral videos claiming to show the scale of the destruction. But while the quakes caused widespread damage and a mounting death toll, many of the clips circulating online have nothing to do with the disaster.

One widely shared video, viewed hundreds of thousands of times, appears to show a white apartment building collapsing, sending a huge cloud of dust and debris into the air as a bystander runs for safety. Social media users falsely claimed it showed a building brought down by the earthquakes in Venezuela.

A reverse image search, however, traced the footage to Turkey. The same video was published by Turkish news outlets in October 2023, documenting the controlled demolition of a damaged apartment building in the city of Kahramanmaraş. The building had been severely weakened by the powerful earthquakes that struck southern Turkey earlier that year. Google Street View imagery supports those reports. Images captured in 2022 show the apartment block still standing, while more recent imagery from 2025 confirms it has since been demolished.

The clip highlights one of the most common forms of disaster misinformation: recycling footage from unrelated events and falsely presenting it as current. Since the earthquakes struck Venezuela, similar videos from countries including Thailand and Myanmar have also been falsely shared as scenes from the disaster.

But recycled footage from other countries is only one tactic. Fact-checkers have also identified older videos filmed in Venezuela that are now being falsely presented as footage from the recent earthquakes.

One such video claims to show an explosion inside the Caracas Metro triggered by last week’s earthquakes. The footage shows passengers scrambling from a train onto the platform, with social media posts claiming the tremors caused a blast that left commuters in chaos.

While the video was genuinely filmed in Caracas, it predates the recent earthquakes by several years. Reverse image searches trace the footage back to September 2021, when Spanish-language media reported an electrical system failure at Los Dos Caminos station. 

The claim illustrates another common misinformation tactic: repurposing genuine but outdated footage to falsely suggest it depicts a current event. In many cases, misleading posts combine both approaches, using old videos that are also taken from unrelated locations.

Artificial intelligence is adding a new layer to the problem. One viral video, viewed millions of times on X, claims to show two high-rise towers swaying violently before collapsing during the Venezuela earthquakes.

The footage is AI-generated. The buildings bend in an unrealistic, rubber-like fashion, surrounding vehicles and objects fail to react naturally to the collapse, and the debris consists of repetitive, uniform fragments rather than the varied concrete and steel expected in a real structural failure.

The Venezuela earthquakes have become a textbook example of the three dominant forms of visual misinformation surrounding major disasters: recycled footage from other countries, old videos falsely presented as current, an AI-generated content designed to farm engagement online and spread fear.