How the Internet Fuels Cell Phone Scares

As Cristen Conger noted elsewhere on Discovery News, a recent bill in the Maine state senate proposed a label warning cell phone users (especially children and pregnant women) of the risks of brain cancer from electromagnetic radiation from the devices. The bill was not passed because there's little scientific evidence linking cell phone use and cancer.

But whether or not the scientific community finds that cell phones are dangerous, many in the public believe they are. If the evidence is lacking, why are some people so concerned?

One reason is that scary warnings about the dangers of cell phones have circulated for years in the form of forwarded e-mails. Some were about the cancer dangers, but others contained new myths about the dangers of cell phones. According to the Snopes urban legend reference Web site. one warning that circulated in 2004 stated, “Don’t answer a cell phone while it is being charged! A few days ago, a person was recharging his cell phone at home. Just at that time a call came through and he attended to it... He was rushed to the nearby hospital, but was pronounced dead on arrival. A cell phone is a very useful modern invention. However, we must be aware that it can also be an instrument of death. FORWARD THIS TO THE PEOPLE THAT MATTER IN YOUR LIFE, I JUST DID!”

Last June the cell phone panic jumped into a new medium, YouTube, and went viral. That’s when, as Tracy King, a British media researcher, noted in the September/October 2009 issue of Skeptical Inquirer science magazine, “A series of videos on YouTube appeared to show four cell phone users popping a table full of corn kernels simply by pointing their ringing phones at them. The implication for the casual observer was clear: if cell phones emit enough radiation to pop corn, imagine what they are doing to your brain!”

The video generated huge publicity, and was seen worldwide. Exactly as they had done with the earlier hoax e-mail warnings, friends who saw the video forwarded the link to other friends, either as a silly gag or out of sincere concern for their safety. Since the video was anonymous, many wondered if it was posted by a well-meaning cell phone scientist who wanted to warn the world but was afraid of repercussions for his career if his employers found out he was alerting the public to this horrific danger.

As it turns out, the video was a hoax.

Not only was it a hoax, it was an advertisement, a bit of clever marketing (or scare-mongering, depending on your point of view) by a company called Cardo Systems, which sold wireless Bluetooth headsets for cell phones. “The creative team at Cardo who created the popcorn videos exploited existing concerns about cell-phone radiation and made them legend. The ‘anonymous’ videos were viewed nearly 10 million times in just two weeks before Cardo stepped forward to take credit, although not, initially, to debunk the pseudoscience," King noted.

The advertisement did its job and got attention—but scared people in the process. Sadly, the public often pay more attention to hoaxes, media scares, and clever marketing than good scientific evidence.