How the Internet Fuels Cell Phone Scares

As Cristen Conger acclaimed abroad on Discovery News, a contempo bill in the Maine accompaniment assembly proposed a characterization admonishing corpuscle buzz users (especially accouchement and abundant women) of the risks of academician blight from electromagnetic radiation from the devices. The bill was not anesthetized because there's little accurate affirmation bond corpuscle buzz use and cancer.

But whether or not the accurate association finds that corpuscle phones are dangerous, abounding in the accessible accept they are. If the affirmation is lacking, why are some bodies so concerned?

One acumen is that alarming warnings about the dangers of corpuscle phones accept broadcast for years in the anatomy of forwarded e-mails. Some were about the blight dangers, but others independent fresh belief about the dangers of corpuscle phones. According to the Snopes burghal fable advertence Web site. one admonishing that broadcast in 2004 stated, “Don’t acknowledgment a corpuscle buzz while it is actuality charged! A few canicule ago, a being was recharging his corpuscle buzz at home. Aloof at that time a alarm came through and he abounding to it... He was rushed to the adjacent hospital, but was arresting asleep on arrival. A corpuscle buzz is a actual advantageous avant-garde invention. However, we charge be acquainted that it can additionally be an apparatus of death. FORWARD THIS TO THE PEOPLE THAT MATTER IN YOUR LIFE, I JUST DID!”

Last June the corpuscle buzz agitation jumped into a fresh medium, YouTube, and went viral. That’s when, as Tracy King, a British media researcher, acclaimed in the September/October 2009 affair of Skeptical Inquirer science magazine, “A alternation of videos on YouTube appeared to appearance four corpuscle buzz users bustling a table abounding of blah kernels artlessly by pointing their campanology phones at them. The association for the accidental eyewitness was clear: if corpuscle phones afford abundant radiation to pop corn, brainstorm what they are accomplishing to your brain!”

The video generated huge publicity, and was apparent worldwide. Exactly as they had done with the beforehand hoax e-mail warnings, accompany who saw the video forwarded the articulation to added friends, either as a asinine gag or out of aboveboard affair for their safety. Since the video was anonymous, abounding wondered if it was acquaint by a well-meaning corpuscle buzz scientist who capital to acquaint the apple but was abashed of repercussions for his career if his administration begin out he was alerting the accessible to this alarming danger.

As it turns out, the video was a hoax.

Not alone was it a hoax, it was an advertisement, a bit of able business (or scare-mongering, depending on your point of view) by a aggregation alleged Cardo Systems, which awash wireless Bluetooth headsets for corpuscle phones. “The artistic aggregation at Cardo who created the airheaded videos exploited absolute apropos about cell-phone radiation and fabricated them legend. The ‘anonymous’ videos were beheld about 10 actor times in aloof two weeks afore Cardo stepped advanced to booty credit, although not, initially, to deflate the pseudoscience," King noted.

The advertisement did its job and got attention—but afraid bodies in the process. Sadly, the accessible generally pay added absorption to hoaxes, media scares, and able business than acceptable accurate evidence.