Five years ago, Dr. Mezmet Oz wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed, urging social media companies to crack down on fake videos featuring celebrities pitching medical cures.
If a new Instagram video featuring the celebrity TV doctor with a blackened eye is any indication, his fight continues.
A Feb. 26 Instagram post claimed Oz, also a former Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, was attacked on his TV show because of his diabetes breakthrough. It shows a group of unidentified men scuffling on a TV set before cutting to Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who said, “An attempt on Dr. Oz’s life, live.”
“The doctor sues pharmaceutical companies over a cheap diabetes remedy. He came to talk about a new innovative remedy that can cure diabetes in three days. Who is against this medical advancement and why?” Ingraham said in the video. The video then cut to Oz, with a black eye, talking about the “pharmaceutical mafia” being against his “medical breakthrough.”
The Instagram post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
There is no evidence Oz has promoted a diabetes breakthrough, and the video has telltale signs of a deepfake. The fight seen in the beginning of the video was not from Oz’s show.
(Instagram screenshot)
Using reverse-image searches of screenshots from the Instagram video, we found Oz didn’t get a black eye from a fight on his TV set. The fight scene seen in the Instagram video is from a 2022 Ukrainian talk show. Yuriy Butusov, a journalist, punched Nestor Shufrych, a pro-Russian politician, onstage during filming of “Freedom of Speech,” a few days before Russia invaded Ukraine, according to news reports.
We also found a video of Oz on his show, wearing the same clothes and making the same hand gestures seen in the Instagram video. He has no black eye in the video, and no fisticuffs broke out onstage during his interview with Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist and author.
As is common in deepfake videos, the words said by Ingraham and Oz in the video, and by several people who later raved about the supposed cure on camera, appear to be computer-generated because their words do not align with their mouth movements.
Oz, on his website, urged his fans to “beware of scammers” using his name and likeness to sell fake products. “The only real videos of me are coming from my verified social media accounts linked directly on this website,” he wrote.
Oz is listed as a global adviser for iHerb, a company that sells health and wellness products. On a list of conditions the company offers “help with” on its website, diabetes is not listed. Nor could we find evidence Oz has pitched a diabetes cure on his social media accounts; he has warned followers about fake ads featuring his likeness.
In his 2019 Wall Street Journal article, Oz referenced a Facebook ad featuring, “Dr. Oz’s diabetes breakthrough.” “Friends and viewers wanted to know if it was legit,” he wrote. “It wasn’t.” PolitiFact has debunked numerous social media posts that claim to show Oz endorsing medical products, such as gummies.
The video claiming to show that Oz was attacked onstage because he was promoting a breakthrough diabetes cure is False.
