Why Do Urban Legends Go Viral?

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the linguistic features that make urban legends go viral, highlighting their blend of credibility and entertainment, and demonstrates machine learning methods to identify such stories based on these traits.

Contribution

It provides a quantitative NLP analysis of urban legends' characteristics and introduces machine learning techniques to detect them using simple features.

Findings

Urban legends balance credibility and entertainment to enhance virality.

NLP features can effectively distinguish urban legends from other texts.

Machine learning models can recognize urban legends with high accuracy.

Abstract

Urban legends are a genre of modern folklore, consisting of stories about rare and exceptional events, just plausible enough to be believed, which tend to propagate inexorably across communities. In our view, while urban legends represent a form of "sticky" deceptive text, they are marked by a tension between the credible and incredible. They should be credible like a news article and incredible like a fairy tale to go viral. In particular we will focus on the idea that urban legends should mimic the details of news (who, where, when) to be credible, while they should be emotional and readable like a fairy tale to be catchy and memorable. Using NLP tools we will provide a quantitative analysis of these prototypical characteristics. We also lay out some machine learning experiments showing that it is possible to recognize an urban legend using just these simple features.