Original article (in Bosnian) was published on 9/1/2026; Author: Marija Ćosić
What are the claims?
A video showing a large number of people in the streets depicts celebrations in Venezuela after the United States “arrested” President Nicolás Maduro.
What are the facts?
The video shows protests from July 2024 over the results of the presidential elections in Venezuela
On 3 January, 2026, the armed forces of the United States carried out attacks on Venezuela. During the attacks, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were “arrested” and taken to the United States. According to Venezuelan authorities, more than 100 people were killed in the U.S. attacks.
This U.S. military action triggered the spread of numerous disinformation narratives, most often through the use of fake and old images and videos. Raskrinkavanje wrote about one such example in an analysis available at this link. That analysis also provides more details about U.S. actions and the removal of the Venezuelan president and his wife.
On the day of the U.S. attacks and the “arrest” of Maduro, 3 January 2026, a video showing a large crowd of people in the streets was published on Facebook, accompanied by a description suggesting that it shows how “millions of Venezuelans are celebrating the removal of Maduro’s kleptocratic regime”.
This post generated several hundred interactions on Facebook, and the same video was shared on other profiles with similar claims.
What are the Facts?
The video shared in these posts is not related to the U.S. “arrest” of Maduro. In fact, it was recorded more than a year earlier. The same video was shared in this misleading context in other languages as well, and it has been analyzed by numerous fact-checking platforms and media outlets worldwide (1, 2, 3). These analyses explained that the footage dates back to 2024.
Specifically, the video was indeed recorded in Venezuela, but it shows mass protests from July 2024, not a “celebration” from 2026. Social-media posts featuring this video have been available since late July 2024, and in those posts it was claimed that the footage shows crowds participating in these protests (1, 2, 3, 4).
That the footage is identical is evident from a simple comparison of the published frames. The crowd and the vehicles visible in it look the same in the posts from January 2026 and those from July 2024.
The earlier Raskrinkavanje abovementioned analysis also dealt with the presentation of footage recorded in July 2024 as current. As explained in detail in that analysis, in July 2024 Nicolás Maduro was declared the winner of the presidential elections in Venezuela, while the opposition claimed that the results were not accurate.
These events triggered mass protests in the country, which resulted in deaths of more than 20 people and the arrest of more than 2,000 others. Meanwhile, the authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro remained in power.
While there are reports of some Venezuelan citizens celebrating Maduro’s “arrest”, this video does not show such events. There is no evidence that celebrations on the scale shown in the video took place in Venezuela.According to the facts, we assess the sharing of this video with claims about “Venezuelans celebrating” as disinformation.
