Alan MacLeod Profile picture
Jul 29, 2024 18 tweets 7 min read Read on X
[Thread] There is a coup d'etat attempt underway here in Venezuela 🇻🇪, fueled by tons of fake news.

In this thread, I'll debunk some of the most egregious and viral fake stories circulating.

Add your own in the replies.
A viral video claims that leftist thieves are stealing ballot boxes.

In reality, these are aircon units.

Ballot boxes are small brown cardboard boxes, barely larger than a shoebox.

These giant appliances bear no resemblance to ballot boxes.

This is what a ballot box in Venezuela actually looks like. Image
This video, claiming to show huge clashes between protestors and police today is going viral.

But, as @ldejesusreyes and others have noted, this video is 7 years old.

This image, which many claim to be official election results, has been seen by tens of millions of people.

It claims that the vote count is 109%.

But actually, all that happened is that the three minor opposition candidates pictured got 4.6% of the vote together, not each.

This is a simple data entry error from someone making an infographic for the TV.

These are not the official results. The official results add up to 100%.

Dishonest actors are promoting this to spread the idea that the official election results are fraudulent.Image
@ldejesusreyes People are claiming this image is from the national electoral council (CNE), and the charts on the screens show a Gonzalez victory.

But this isn't from the CNE at all. Rather, it is from Mercal Aragua, a totally different organization with no access to voting information. Image
The opposition is also blatantly using a bot network to boost their narrative on social media

HT: @JulianMaciasT
Image
Image
I know for a fact that this is fake news, because I was right there in this crowd as this video was taken.

It was, in fact, the opposition that tried to shut down this Caracas polling station.

A group of over 100 right-wing demonstrators crowded round the entrance to stop people from entering.Image
Elon Musk himself retweets a video purporting to show protestors tearing down a statue of President Hugo Chavez today.

But this video is from 2017. Image
The widely circulated images of a man in Aragua "murdered by government" are completely fake, as this video, shared by @BrianMteleSUR clearly shows. He just gets up and leaves, after he "dies".

Blatantly fake news!

Perhaps the most important fake news is that the opposition actually won 73% of the vote.

The US government has fueled these allegations.

But I spoke to dozens of American electoral observers here, and they told a very different story.

My report:

mintpressnews.com/venezuela-whil…
Versions of this image, which purport to show a police officer pointing a gun at a defenseless woman and child, have been seen by millions of people.

But video evidence clearly shows that the police officer is unarmed, and is actually waving his arms at her.

HT: @JulianMaciasT
Image
This is total nonsense. I've been speaking with people flying out from the airport, and it is operating completely normally. There is no takeover of the airport at all.

And as for Maduro, he just gave a speech tonight at the presidential palace, in front of thousands of people. So much for fleeing the country!Image
Image
This video has 1.7 million views, and 21,000 likes. But it is highly misleading: the video is from 2017.

Right-wing Spanish politician Isabel Diaz Ayuso jumps on the fake news bandwagon, sharing a 2017 clip, as if it was from this week.

Expect a lot more of this in the coming days.

HT: @JulianMaciasT

@JulianMaciasT This viral video has been seen by millions.

It claims to show the Venezuelan 🇻🇪 military massacring peaceful protestors.

Two problems:

1. It is from 2016 🤦
2. It is from Turkiye 🇹🇷

You'll never believe this, but Alex Jones is putting out fake news on Venezuela, falsely claiming Maduro has ordered the arreat of his opposition opponent, Edmundo Gonzalez.

Right-wing Colombian senator Maria Fernanda Cabal shares a video of Maduro's men torturing their opponents.

The problem? It is actually a clip from the Netflix show, Simón. Image

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More from @AlanRMacLeod

Mar 4
A reminder that only 23% of Americans can find Iran on a world map. Image
Many of the top NGOs pushing for war with Iran are quietly being funded by the CIA, my new investigation can reveal.

Find out which ones by reading it here (for free):

mintpressnews.com/revealed-the-c…
The US military has found a new way to lure young men into enlisting: thirst traps.

Read my investigation, "From Simp to Soldier: How the Military is Using E-Girls To Recruit Gen Z Into Service" here:

mintpressnews.com/simp-to-soldie…
Read 4 tweets
Mar 2
By hitting the Gandhi Hospital in Tehran today, the United States has now deliberately bombed medical centers in 15 different countries since 1945.

Those countries are:

Iran
🇾🇪 Yemen
🇸🇾 Syria
🇱🇾 Libya
🇮🇶 Iraq
Yugoslavia
🇸🇩 Sudan
🇸🇴Somalia
🇬🇩 Grenada
🇸🇻 El Salvador
🇳🇮 Nicaragua
🇻🇳 Vietnam
🇰🇭 Cambodia
🇱🇦 Laos
🇰🇵🇰🇷 Korea

mintpressnews.com/us-bombing-hos…Image
In March 2025, Trump carried out a premeditated attack on the Al Rasool Al-Azam Oncology Hospital in Saada, Yemen, turning it into rubble. At least two people were killed and 13 more injured.

This was not an isolated incident. Eight days previously, on March 16, Washington launched 13 separate airstrikes against the building, systematically destroying the hospital’s five blocks.

The Anti-Cancer Fund, a local government medical organization, described the events as a clear “war crime.”Image
Image
Syria 🇸🇾 In 2017, on Trump's orders, US forces repeatedly bombed the National Hospital in Raqqa, carrying out 20 separate attacks against the building, including using white phosphorous munitions.

A highly controversial and widely-banned weapon, white phosphorous instantly ignites upon contact with oxygen, sticks to clothes and skin, and burns at an extremely high temperature. It cannot be extinguished by water, leaving those affected to suffer excruciating – and deadly – injuries.

At least 30 civilians were killed, some likely due to the effects of the white phosphorous, which causes respiratory damage and organ failure.Image
Read 17 tweets
Feb 2
Alert🚨: New Epstein email I found shows renowned academic Noam Chomsky telling Epstein that he is “fantasizing about” Little St. James Island.

(I'm digging through the Epstein Files for Chomsky's connections to the disgraced pedophile. Check my timeline/follow for more drops.)Image
Noam Chomsky participates in Jeffrey Epstein's birthday, even contributing a note for a "birthday booklet" -- which sounds very similar to the infamous 2003 one Trump wrote a poem for. Image
"I am very enthusiastic about these meetings" with a convicted sex trafficker, Noam Chomsky's wife says, about the pair meeting up in Boston. Image
Read 11 tweets
Jan 28
This is one of the most extraordinary and illuminating passages in all journalism.

CNN frames Maduro as a paranoid liar for claiming the CIA is trying to overthrow him.

Yet in the very next sentence, it casually notes that the CIA did, in fact, overthrow him.

The level of cognitive dissonance and imperial brain rot you must have to write this, and then have it read by an editor and published, is truly breathtaking.Image
In Western media, the US government is always presented as a force for good, even when it is attempting regime change ops.

Meanwhile, the idea that the CIA might be trying to overthrow foreign governments, when considered at all, is presented as a ludicrous accusation from a "dictator" that they've been defaming for years, as my academic paper explored.

You can read it here for free with this link.

frontiersin.org/journals/commu…
As @ryangrim pointed out, there is ample concrete evidence that the CIA and US government have been trying over overthrow Maduro for years.

Multiple books from cabinet members have confirmed that the CIA was carrying out terror operations in Venezuela during Trump's first term, and John Bolton's book all-but-confesses that the US government was behind the 2018 assassination attempt against Maduro.

And in 2020, a CIA agent was caught outside Venezuela's largest oil refinery carrying explosives.

You probably haven't heard about this, because it was completely ignored in the Western press.

Here's my article about it:

mintpressnews.com/media-complete…
Read 4 tweets
Nov 30, 2025
Venezuelan citizens join local militias to defend their homeland from a US attack 🇻🇪 Image
Image
I haven't promoted this much, but I've published a ton of academic articles about Venezuela and the media distortions against the country.

Check them out here:

frontiersin.org/journals/commu…

journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/a…

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…
I've been to Venezuela many times, including to observe the 2024 elections.

I spoke to dozens of US election observers, who were impressed by the quality +openness of proceedings.

All of them said Venezuelan elections were better than US ones

My report:
mintpressnews.com/venezuela-whil…
Read 5 tweets
Oct 16, 2025
[Thread 🇻🇪🇺🇸] Discussion of the phrase "Venezuela human rights" has hit a massive all-time high, according to Google Trends.

In this thread, I'll show how that is a clear sign that a potential US military intervention is imminent. Image
The United States has moved around 10,000 troops to the region, as the Trump administration openly states it is trying to carry out regime change in Venezuela.

Yesterday, Trump announced he had authorized "lethal" CIA missions inside Venezuela, in order to topple President Nicolás Maduro.

Interest & use of the phrase "Libya human rights" peaked in March 2011, just hours before the US led a massive intervention in the country, overthrowing President Gaddafi, and turning North Africa's most prosperous country into a failed state, replete with open-air slave markets.

Once the operation started, Western interest in Libyan human rights fell to almost zero.Image
Read 8 tweets

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