No, they did not do surgery on a banana over 5G

A couple of weeks ago I asked vergecast listeners to send me real-world examples of meaningful 5G experiences, as the 5G industrial complex overpromised what the technology would deliver. My example is the impressive network capacity in NFL stadiums, which has enabled thousands of people to simultaneously live stream the Eras Tour at every stop, but that’s basically all I can think of.

What I didn’t expect was dozens and dozens of people sending me versions of a video showing a banana getting stitches on a robotic surgery device, with captions claiming the surgery is being done remotely over 5G. This video had a incredible journey; Has been republished dozens of times at the other side of multiple platforms, all with the same basic claim: a surgeon in London operated on a banana in California with 5G. He’s such a trusted driver of social media video views that he keeps coming back. Product search only published this month!

This post on X from “TechBurrito Uno” is a great example, and it’s a particularly funny example because of the untied credit. It now has 15.1 million views and, as with any video that goes viral, dozens of other accounts chasing uncritically viewed it also reposted it, sometimes with threads about how it shows the future and why that definitely means it. you should subscribe to their newsletters.

Once that sort of thing starts happening on social platforms, the story tends to break out onto the web, where posting quick, loose stories about viral videos can drive cheap traffic. so here we have 5GWorldPro.coma site that appears to be an SEO lure for 5G training seminars, typing a whole story about this video which states that “5G’s low latency is the main enabler here.”

Well, you knew what was coming. None of these people ever verified that the claims in the video were true or that the video actually showed robotic surgery on a banana performed via 5G. I leave this as an exercise for you, the reader, to determine why no one asked basic questions about the claims in this video: Who was the doctor? What robotic surgery tool was used? Was there a press release about it? What networks were involved? – instead of just posting it for influence.

What I willpower We offer you some very simple answers.

This video does not in any way show robotic surgery performed with 5G. The video was first posted to TikTok in 2020 by Dr. Kais Rona, a robotic and bariatric surgeon at Smart Dimensions Weight Loss in Southern California, and has been actively telling people that it’s not 5G ever since.

I messaged Dr. Rona on Instagram. I sent an email to the contact address on her website. And I called the office enough times for the very nice receptionist to say, “It’s about the banana video again,” to someone sitting next to her. And I can’t express how excited I was when Dr. Rona emailed me back and agreed to a short interview.

“I operated on this banana, but it had no more than 5G,” Dr. Rona told me.

“I saw someone post my video and say it was a surgeon from New York performing an operation on someone in London, and I thought, wait, what is this?” he says. “I told him: ‘This is not true, this is my video.’”

“So yeah, it’s fake. The procedure was performed in Los Angeles. The banana was in Los Angeles.”

Dr. Rona made the video during the pandemic, when his clinic was not open to patients and he wanted to practice using his Da Vinci Xi robotic surgery device. “I thought, you know, what can I do to maintain my skills? So he would bring fruit to the operating room and practice with bananas and other fruits. I thought it’s kind of interesting and people would like to see this. So I posted it and it went viral.”

Unsurprisingly, Dr. Rona has mixed feelings about the situation and how medical information is being spread on social media after experiencing the journey of this video.

“Disinformation spreads like wildfire on social media,” he says. “I think it’s good and it’s bad, like anything else. I think it’s good to be exposed and you can get correct and objective information from other doctors, whether they are GI specialists or cardiologists, but many times people post things that are not true or repost things from doctors and change the message, and that could be dangerous for sure.”

There has been another important result of this video that went so viral for Dr. Rona. “I feel like I’m becoming a banana specialist,” he says with a laugh. “My friends make fun of me. They tell me: ‘Oh, you operate on fruit all day.’

Anyway, there you have it. They operated on a grape. They operated on a banana. They have performed surgery on 5G in China. But my friends, no one has ever performed 5G surgery on a banana.