L4: legends and storytelling online

Folklore example Antifa

• Elsfest riots: The Hague 20/09/25

  • Burning police car

• Conspiracy theory alternative to motive for riot

  • Far right hooligans? Or a false flag operation by Antifa (far left) and undercover police

  • Far right protest with left wing counter protest —> egg on to become more violent

  • Fake facebook page made claiming to be Antifa, spreading mis/disinformation that a lot of people did believe

Stories bottom up

individuals start stories

Stories bottom up & top down

rumor started by individuals and picked up by news networks, governments 

• Ex. Antifa and Jan 6 in US —> not MAGA but Antifa that committed the violence or egged others on to commit violence

  • Narrative motif

Folklore example they are eating the dogs 

• Its an old story

• Nigel Farage claimed that immigrants were eater swans 15 years ago 

• 2003: swan bake —> asylum seeker steal the queens birds for BBQ

• 2023: Trump claimed immigrants were eating their neighbors dogs and cats

• 1977: Chinese restaurant serving dog

• 1880: racist stereotype of Asians eating rats —> used to promote rat poison

Revenge of the kangaroos

• Couple hit kangaroo with car, not dead, move it to the side of the road and put their jacket on it, the kangaroo wakes up and jumps off with their jacket including their keys and wallets

Weaponized folklore

ex meme

Weaponizing legends

• Reused as political propaganda

  • USSR: AIDS was an American bio-weapon

Examples of folklores 

• Kitta: the kiss of death

• Netherlands dancing in clogs

• Love locks on bridges

  • Informal

  • Makes the bridges unstable

  • Throw away key, pollute water

Folklore

• is the traditional, unofficial, non-institutional part of culture. It encompasses all knowledge, understandings, values, attitudes, assumptions, feelings and beliefs transmitted in traditional forms by word of mouth or by customary examples

  • Ex. Marriage

    • Only official part is signing a paper everything else is tradition

Folklore media

• Withstand nuclear war —> hybrid

  • Military - commercial - institutional

• 70s - 80s —>interconnect the world and get your voice heard

• Participatory culture 

What distinguishes legends from other stories?

• Legends are rhetorical construction: a story that is characterized as traditional; its truth is a matter of debate

• Legends as process, not product: an ongoing debate about belief

• Legend as collective sense-making by probing consensus reality’s outer limits

Relatives to legends

Rumor

Gossip

Myth

Rumor

unverified information, not necessarily narrative

Gossip 

unverified and unofficial, mostly negative information about the private lives of individual people

Myth

untrue story; stories about gods, creation, etc. set outside historical time 

Our examples of legends

• Vaccination

• Epidemics: covid, HIV/AIDS, SARS

• Something causes autism

• Something causes cancer

• Something cures cancer

• Food & diet

Cross-genre outbreak narratives

• In popular culture, news, science, and legend

• New disease, old story

  • Stores predate epidemics and shape attitudes and policies

  • Ex. Jews were often accused on poisoning the wells and drinking water in mediaeval ages

    • Can still be seen today of being the ones spreading disease

• Animal origins —> etiological legends

• Blaming foreigners, xenophobia

  • Sharing legends as a means of expressing fears of foreigners without owning the story

    • Asians specifically spreading disease

  • Zombies connected to Ebola —> fake

• Conspiracy theories

• Conscious contamination

  • Ex. Mary Mallon —> Typhoid Mary

    • Irish cook in US

      • Cooked for people spreading the virus till she was locked up

  • Patient zero: Gaetan Dugas

    • Falsely patient zero for AIDS in US

    • Journalist changed patient O to patient zero and pinned it on Dugas

      • Made a good story

• Biowarfare

  • Covid started in Chinese lab ?

Folklore vs disinformation

Folklore	Disinformation
Bottom up	Top-down
Emic (insider perspective)	Etic (outsider perspective)

Spiking drinks as legend case study

focus on online narrative and debates… not on toxicology, incidence and convictions 

Spiking drinks: historical

• 1913: needle attacks in a cinema

  • People start debating this phenomena

    • Is it imaginary or is it actually happening?

• This is a reoccurring story

Spiking drinks online

• Vernacular web

  • Comment sections of news, social media

    • Problem with comment sections: how do you know these people are real and believe this?

• Community values

  • Where does the line go of when you have gone against these values?

Drink spiking comments

• It's true, my mother told me so

• It was in the paper the other day

• The taste is so strong - no way you could miss it

• This stuff is odorless and tasteless - the perfect rape drug

• Bullshit!

• It's just hysterics that's what it is

• Oldest story in the book. Total load of c***

• Same thing happened to my best friend last year

• Then I fainted - guess some b***d put roofies in my drink!

Drink spiking standpoint and arguments

• Drinking spiking stories are true bc…

  • So many stories about incidents like these; perpetrators have been convicted

  • Drugs have been found in victims blood and urine samples

• Drink spiking stories could be true bc…

  • These drugs make you loose your memory. So it’s plausible that people abuse them for this purpose

  • These drugs are colorless and odorless

  • All theses campaigns agaisnt drink spiking — must be some truth in there

  • Better safe than sorry

  • It’s a strange world