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Part of Memes and virality as copying: why viral is only a past tense
Understanding memes and virality comparison properly
A memes and virality comparison of five things people call the same word: format, trend, catchphrase, hoax and challenge, and what each demands.
Five different things get called the same word, and the confusion is not pedantic. A trend, a format, a catchphrase, a hoax and a challenge behave differently, need different evidence, and fail in different ways.
Any comparison of memes and virality that skips the split ends up comparing unlike things. Calling all of them memes means every claim made about one gets applied to the other four. That causes most bad writing on this subject.
This page separates them by class and difference, gives the diagnostic that distinguishes each pair, and names a real case for every class.
What to take away
- The distinguishing question is what a participant producesa copy, a purchase, a phrase, a belief, or an act. Distracted Boyfriend is a copy, fidget spinners were a purchase, "on fleek" was a phrase, the Momo Challenge was a belief, and the Ice Bucket Challenge was an act.
- Two of the five carry real risk to people, and they should never be described in a way that helps anyone run one.
- Most disputed cases are objects that changed class partway through their life, which is why the arguments are unresolvable as posed. The Momo Challenge is the standard case.
- A claim about spread means something different for each class, so a number or an assertion carried across classes is meaningless.
The five, by what a participant does
| Class | The participant produces | Spread depends on | Ends when | Evidence that identifies it | Named case |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Format | Another copy, varied in a defined slot | Copying being cheap and the slot being unfilled | The slot is exhausted or the fixed part goes stale | A set of copies sharing structure, differing in one place | Distracted Boyfriend, a stock photo by Antonio Guillem that became a format in 2017 |
| Trend | An adoption: a purchase, a style, a habit | Visibility plus availability | Availability spreads far enough that adoption stops signaling anything | Adoption without a shared artifact | Fidget spinners, which sold for roughly $5 to $20 in 2017 |
| Catchphrase | An utterance | The phrase being useful in ordinary speech | It becomes unmarked and stops being noticed | Use in speech with no reference to a source | "OK boomer," a 2019 TikTok reply that moved into ordinary speech |
| Hoax | A belief, and often a repetition | Plausibility and emotional charge | Correction reaches roughly the same audience, which it rarely does | A factual claim that is false, spreading as true | The Momo Challenge, warned about in early 2019 with no verified harm |
| Challenge | An act, usually recorded | Social pressure and visible participation | Participation stops being praised, or harm becomes visible | An instruction to do something | The Ice Bucket Challenge, which raised more than $115 million for the ALS Association in 2014 |
The general study of how adoption moves through a population is called diffusion of innovations. It was worked out for products and farming practices long before this.
Five classes of viral content
Format
- Participant produces
- Copy
- Spread depends on
- Cheap copying
- Ends when
- Slot exhausted
- Evidence
- Shared structure
- Named case
- Distracted Boyfriend
Trend
- Participant produces
- Adoption
- Spread depends on
- Visibility
- Ends when
- Stops signaling
- Evidence
- No artifact
- Named case
- Fidget spinners
Catchphrase
- Participant produces
- Utterance
- Spread depends on
- Ordinary use
- Ends when
- Becomes unmarked
- Evidence
- Source-free use
- Named case
- OK boomer
Hoax
- Participant produces
- Belief
- Spread depends on
- Plausibility
- Ends when
- Correction spreads
- Evidence
- False claim
- Named case
- Momo Challenge
Challenge
- Participant produces
- Act
- Spread depends on
- Social pressure
- Ends when
- Praise stops
- Evidence
- Instruction
- Named case
- Ice Bucket
It fits the trend row much better than the format row. Fidget spinners moved through US schools in 2017 on visibility and price, about $5 to $20 each. Distracted Boyfriend spread by copying a fixed structure and swapping three labels.
The rows are not degrees of the same thing. A format asks for craft, a trend asks for money or effort, a catchphrase asks for nothing, a hoax asks for credulity, and a challenge asks for an act. Those are five different demands on a person, and the same population responds to them at completely different rates.
The pairs that get confused
Format against trend. A format leaves artifacts that share structure. A trend leaves adoptions that share nothing but a category. If you can line up ten instances and point at the part that is identical, it is a format. If the only shared thing is the description, it is a trend.
Woman Yelling at a Cat is the first kind. The 2019 pairing sets a Real Housewives of Beverly Hills clip beside a photo of a cat named Smudge, and two labels change with every copy. Cottagecore is the second kind: many adopters, one style, no shared artifact.
Catchphrase against format. A catchphrase can be spoken. A format has to be made. The test is whether the thing survives being said aloud with no image, no timing and no tool.
Many formats leave a catchphrase behind when they die, which is why the two get reported as one object with a long life. It is two objects, and the second outlived the first. Vocabulary that came loose from a format and keeps going is covered under social media slang.
"On fleek" is the case. Kayla Newman said it about her eyebrows in a June 2015 Vine. The video is the format, and the phrase is the part that survived.
Hoax against format. A format is understood as constructed by everybody making a copy. A hoax is not. The difference is not the content, which can be identical; it is whether the participants know.
That makes the same artifact one class in a room that gets it and another class in a room that does not. The misinformation argument is genuinely hard rather than a matter of labeling. The families of that argument are set out under critiques of social media.
The Momo Challenge is the clean case. In early 2019, schools and police forces in several countries warned parents about a WhatsApp threat; fact-checkers and the UK Safer Internet Centre found no verified case of a child being harmed. The warnings carried the image further than any threat did.
Challenge against trend. Both are adoptions. A challenge names a specific act and carries an expectation of proof. That expectation is what makes it dangerous: it converts social pressure into a recorded, escalating act.
Coverage of challenges also has a shape of its own, the one described under moral panic, where the reporting supplies the instructions it is warning about.
This site describes dangerous challenges only at the class level, never as instances and never with instructions. There is no version of the subject where a description of the act is required to explain the mechanism.
The Ice Bucket Challenge of summer 2014 named one harmless act and asked for video proof. The ALS Association reported more than $115 million in donations that August. Mannequin Challenge videos in 2016 worked the same way: a room froze mid-pose and someone filmed it.
Where the classes cross
Objects change class, usually in one direction. A format becomes a catchphrase when the phrase detaches. A hoax becomes a format when enough people learn it is false and start copying it knowingly.
A trend becomes a format when someone invents a shared artifact for it. A challenge becomes a trend when the proof requirement drops away.
KC Green's 2013 Gunshow panel, captioned "This is fine," is the first pattern. The line left the drawing and became something people say in bad meetings.
Sea shanties show the third. Nathan Evans posted "The Wellerman" in December 2020. TikTok's duet tool stacked other voices on his recording in January 2021, which handed a singing trend a structure anyone could join.
Known-false claims can be a format too. Peter McIndoe started "Birds Aren't Real" in 2017, and its participants copy a fixed claim about surveillance drones while knowing it is false.
Arguments about "what it really was" go nowhere. Both people are right about different phases, but neither has dates precise enough to say when the change happened. The Momo Challenge is one of these: a hoax reported as a challenge through early 2019.
The honest claim names the phase: it worked as one thing in one period and another later. The transition is not precisely datable, and the general reason nothing here is precisely datable is under platform timelines.
What a spread claim means in each class
Spread is measured differently by class, and the measures are not comparable.
- For a format, spread means the number of distinct makers. Copies by the same person are one adoption. Distracted Boyfriend labels from a single account are one maker, however often they get reposted.
- For a trend, spread means adopters, and adopters are usually invisible unless they announce themselves, so almost every trend figure is a count of announcements. Fidget spinner coverage in 2017 counted sales and school bans as much as users.
- For a catchphrase, spread means speakers, which cannot be counted at all, because the majority of speech is not recorded anywhere. Nobody knows how many people said "on fleek" at a bus stop.
- For a hoax, spread means believers, which is different from repeaters, and the difference is the whole question. Momo warnings reached parents who never believed the threat and passed the warning on.
- For a challenge, spread means participants, and the recorded participants are the ones who chose to record. Ice Bucket videos counted people who filmed; donation totals counted people who never turned on a camera.
None of these has a good source, and none of the sources that exist measure the same object. That is the reason this site states no figures for reach, and the reasoning behind that refusal is set out under benefits of social media, which deals with the same problem from the other side.
Common questions
Is the distinction useful outside writing about this?
It is useful to anyone deciding how to respond. A format needs no response. A hoax needs a correction aimed at the same audience, which is what fact-checkers did with the Momo warnings in 2019. A challenge involving risk needs something else again, and the something else is not a description of the challenge.
What about something that was never copied by anyone?
Then it is not any of the five. A single artifact that got a lot of attention is a single artifact. Attention is not spread, and treating one heavily viewed thing as a movement is the most common error in this subject.
Can a thing be a format and a hoax at once?
For different audiences at the same moment, yes, and that is exactly the hard case. The useful description names both readings rather than picking one.
Why not just accept that everyone uses the word loosely?
Because loose use imports claims. A statement about how fast formats spread gets applied to hoaxes, where it is false and where being wrong costs something. The classes are worth keeping apart for that reason alone.
