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Dartmouth Health otolaryngologist Andrew Spector, MD, was in the operating room Friday afternoon when he started getting urgent calls and texts from an administrator.

Between cases, he called her back, and she told him people were calling and emailing Dartmouth Health about a TikTok video where a man driving a Toyota yells racist slurs at a woman.

Social media had decided it was Spector behind the wheel of that vehicle -- even though it wasn't.

"It's not me in the video," Spector told 乌鸦传媒 in an interview. "This is a case of mistaken identity."

Regardless, the threatening messages started coming. "People started saying, 'We're going to find you. We're coming for you and your family,'" Spector said. "My wife was getting some menacing messages on Facebook from random people, as was I."

The video, , shows a man leveling a racist slur at the woman taking the video. He then reaches out and appears to try to grab her phone as he drives by. He calls her the racist slur again as he drives away, and then his Massachusetts license plate comes into view.

"Internet detectives looked up this person's license plate, and ... the vehicle was registered to someone named Andrew Spector from Woburn, Massachusetts," Spector said. "That's not me."

Nonetheless, speculation abounded, with people jumping to conclusions after seeing Spector's Dartmouth Health .

"I have the unfortunate genetics that I am bald, and so is the driver of the vehicle who was saying these horrible racist things to this woman," Spector said, noting that people also speculated the driver might instead be related to him.

"I have no relationship to the man in the video," he said. "I am not his brother. I am not his father."

The original TikTok post has more than half a million likes and over 20,000 comments. It was widely picked up by other social media accounts, including a YouTube channel with and an Instagram account with .

Commenters urged each other to post negative reviews on his physician profiles, Spector said.

"The word that comes to mind is defamation," he said. "I've been in the same practice since 2005 and with Dartmouth Health since 2014 -- so nearly 20 years of establishing an excellent reputation of taking quality and compassionate care of my patients and community."

"With a couple of keystrokes, that's been tarnished," he said.

Dartmouth Health helped him tremendously, he said, urging him to call his local police department to report the incident, and issuing a press release on his predicament to help him begin to recover his reputation.

"If I were in private practice and I didn't have the backing of Dartmouth behind me, this would have been absolutely ruinous," he said.

Cassidy Smith, a spokesperson for Dartmouth Health, said that Spector is a "fantastic clinician and it was so clear he was being unfairly targeted." Helping to get the word out "just felt like the right thing to do," she added. "We protect our people."

Spector is clear that the person who sustained the most harm is the woman who posted the video.

"Make no mistake, the victim is the woman who recorded the video of some horrible person slinging racial epithets at her and verbally abusing her," he said.

But his case does speak to a deeper societal problem, he said: the "irresponsible use of the internet and social media," to which medicine is no stranger.

"It's easy to click a button on a keyboard without looking somebody in the face and saying negative remarks," he said. "Misinformation spreads much more quickly than the truth does. And once the truth has been established, it seems like the [news] cycle ... has passed."

He said he hopes his case serves as a warning that "this can happen to anybody" and that it opens up a wider discussion about responsible use of social media.

"The last 72 hours have been a bit of a nightmare," said Spector.

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