Fact Check: Meme doesn't accurately show Venezuela as darker at night than rest of South America

Yahoo

a day ago

Claim:
A meme authentically shows a satellite image of South America where Venezuela stands out as the only country without any lights on at night.
Rating:
In July 2025, a meme posted to X claiming people can see socialism on display in Venezuela from space went viral, being viewed over 800,000 times within a week. The post (archived) included an image of an alleged nighttime satellite map of South America, in which Venezuela's borders were clearly visible because the country appeared starkly darker than the rest of the map covered by city lights. Text on the image said, "Socialism, so awesome you can see it from space."
The image has been shared periodically on social media for at least six years. For example, it was posted to Facebook in 2020 and to Reddit in 2019.
But the city lights satellite map in the meme had been edited. In reality, Venezuela is not starkly darker than the rest of the South America and therefore not clearly visible from space.
NASA makes daily nightlight data visible through its Black Marble program. Snopes used the program's interactive timeline map to see the nightlights of the northern part of South America, where Venezuela is located, on July 5, 2025, the night before the viral meme was posted. Venezuela's largest cities along the northern coastline of the country were lit up and clearly visible, just like the cities in neighboring countries. There was also a heavy cluster of lights in the east of the country, where many oil wells are located.
(NASA)
(NASA)
The daily Black Marble maps can be interrupted by cloud cover, and are less clear than the satellite map included in the meme. However, NASA periodically releases cleaner, blue-hued maps of Earth at night such as the one edited for the meme. An example of such a map is this high-resolution one from 2016. But Venezuela's cities and oil wells were lit up in these maps, too, and the country blends in with the rest of the continent rather than standing out as clearly darker.
The map from 2016 was not an aberration, either. A NASA timeline of the Earth at night between 2012 and 2023 shows that Venezuela has never been distinguishably visible when viewed from space at night.
Even during Venezuela's nationwide blackouts in March 2019, the country was not entirely dark. Lower quality NASA maps from the time show there were fewer areas of light in the country when the blackout occurred, but there were still lights in some cities and oil wells.
Venezuela at night from March 6, 2019, to March 10, 2019. Nationwide blackouts began March 8. (NASA)
The southern part of Venezuela is bereft of lights visible in these nighttime maps, but not even that part of Venezuela stands out in contrast to the country's neighbors. That's because the southern portion of the country is covered by the Amazon rainforest, which is sparsely populated in all of the countries it covers. If you pick a random point on Venezuela's border with Brazil or the southern half of Venezuela's border with Colombia on Google Maps, you are unlikely to see any buildings for potentially hundreds of miles. There's no reason uninhabited rainforest would appear darker at night on one side of a border than it does on the other side.
Snopes has previously fact-checked other edited, inaccurate or otherwise mislabeled maps.
Elkins, Kel. "Change in Night Lights between 2012 and 2023." NASA Scientific Visualization Studio, 27 May 2024, svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5276/. Accessed 10 July 2025.
"Night Light Maps Open up New Applications." Earthobservatory.nasa.gov, NASA, 13 Apr. 2017, earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/90008/night-light-maps-open-up-new-applications. Accessed 10 July 2025.
"Worldview: Explore Your Dynamic Planet." Nasa.gov, NASA, worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/. Accessed 10 July 2025.
Google Maps, maps.app.goo.gl/FtFBNSLp6FSgkVV97. Accessed 10 July 2025.