Dispatch: How AI fakes outpaced reality in the Maduro raid
Using SynthID to verify AI deepfakes, automating web scraping, and tracking deleted political posts
Your weekly briefing on digital investigation, OSINT, and the information war.
⚡ The 30-second brief
The debunk: Viral images of Nicolás Maduro’s capture were AI fakes. We identify the three specific ‘artefacts’ that fooled millions.
New tech: Google’s SynthID has moved from beta to Gemini; we show you how to use it for instant verification.
OSINT stack: Professional guides on scraping evidence, finding deleted posts from politicians, and tracking vehicle licence plates.
Data culture: How Radiohead used Spotify metrics to ditch their hits for deep cuts on the 2025 tour.
🔦 In the Spotlight
Fact-check: We recently dissected a viral image claiming to show Nicolás Maduro being taken into custody by U.S. forces. Read the full breakdown.
Monitoring: Developments in Venezuela led to heightened speculation about the Trump administration’s potential plans to take military action in other countries, like Greenland, Colombia, Mexico and Cuba. As world leaders prepared their responses, the discourse on social media laid the groundwork for additional OSINT surveillance.
🖋️ The Lead: Seeing isn’t believing in Caracas
On January 3, 2026, a high-resolution image of Nicolás Maduro being escorted to a transport plane dominated global feeds. It was the perfect smoking gun — except it was synthetic.
While the world waited for official confirmation, members of the Spotlight network used Google DeepMind’s SynthID to debunk the imagery hours before the White House released an actual photo of Maduro in custody.
Our digital analysis identified several ‘AI artefacts’ that exposed the deception:
Impossible physics: The aircraft featured impossible aerodynamics and non-standard landing gear.
Uniform gibberish: Uniform patches on the guards were nonsensical and matched no known military units.
Shadow logic: Distorted hand geometry and inconsistent facial shadows confirmed synthetic generation.
The takeaway: The first photo of a major breaking news event is now more likely to be fake than real. Verification must happen at the point of consumption, not hours later.
— Maria
⚙️ The intelligence stack
🔍 SynthID: Google DeepMind’s SynthID Detector was launched in mid-2025 and works by detecting an imperceptible embedded watermark in content generated or altered by Google’s AI programmes. While a SynthID dashboard giving detailed information is open to early testers, the detector has also been integrated into Google’s Gemini AI assistant.
💡 Quick tip: SynthID can work even when content has been somewhat transformed, but heavy filters or photos of the image on a screen can limit its usefulness. In case of an inconclusive result, try to find other cleaner versions of the same image to test.
📍 Mastering web scraping: Derek Bowler’s guide on automating evidence collection and SHA-256 data preservation. (via Eurovision News Spotlight)
📍 Investigative toolkit: Rowan Philp (GIJN) curates 2025’s best tools for tracking corporate misconduct and automating YouTube summaries. (via GIJN)
📍Ad fraud & OSINT: Craig Silverman discusses tracking the money behind disinformation. (via The 404 Media Podcast)
📍 Migration tracker: BBC Verify’s new postcode-searchable database to contextualize UK migration stats with embeddable modules. (via BBC Verify)
📍 Ghost posts: Benjamin Strick’s masterclass on using Factba.se and Politwoops to recover deleted political tweets. (via Bendobrown)
📍 License plate tracking: A new primer on vehicle OSINT using Platesmania and regional databases. (via AirCorridor)
📡 Signal analysis
🎧 FACTS IN : FACTS OUT: Is AI breaking the news? Giles Gibson visits the BBC's headquarters in London to dig into cutting-edge research on the growing use of AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity for news-related questions. (via Eurovision News Podcast)
🎸 Before we go…
Radiohead by the numbers: Investigative skills aren’t just for conflict zones. Richard Irvine-Brown applied an open-source data lens to Radiohead’s 2025 European tour.
By scraping and cross-referencing Spotify streams against RateYourMusic scores, the project reveals a fascinating trend: the band’s 2025 setlists systematically prioritized ‘fan-favourite’ deep cuts over mainstream hits like “Creep”. It’s a masterclass in using cultural data to track a shift in artistic strategy. (via @richib.bsky.social)