WHY do people start urban legends on the internet?

Factual Questions
1

Recently, a gullible friend of mine circulated an email containing a message that allegedly came from a “security specialist” with the Sûreté du Québec, the Quebec Police force. The message is in French and I will not reproduce it here, but suffice it to say that it is a rehash of the old, old, old urban legnd that gangs (this time the ‘bloods’ in Quebec) drive around with their headlights off at night with a new initiate in the car. You know the rest of the story. The initiate has to kill the people in the first car that flashes their lights at them, yadda, yadda. You can read all about this UL at Flashing Headlights Gang Initiation | Snopes.com

The point that gets me is that this message is all in French, so someone had to sit down and write it by translating from an existing message, presumably one in English. Furthermore, the woman officer with the Quebec Police Force who is cited as the author of this message really exists, and for further realism her correct phone number is given. Needless to say this poor woman never wrote this and would love to get her hands on the one who did.

My question is, who writes this shit? (in ANY language)

Why do they do it? What does it give them? Any theories? Has anyone ever tracked a specific message like this back to its source? Is it even possible to track them down?

2

Why does anyone do anything?

To impress chicks. :stuck_out_tongue:

3

I had a professor in college that was one of the foremost rumor researchers in the world. He consulted for big companies like Coca Cola when they had an issue with PR type rumors. He said that it is almost impossible to track one down to its source and that it often isn’t even possible in theory because the rumor(legend) mutates over time.

4

More of an IMHO question, but -

  • Because they can
  • Because they’re bored
  • Because they take delight in spreading fear and seeing the looks of terror on peoples’ faces as they read/hear their bogus stories
  • Because they want attention, possibly as a side effect of emotional neglect in their early childhoods
  • Because it’s the internet, it’s anonymous, and you can’t really be held accountable for your words when you’re anonymous
  • Because they heard a true story, which got a little garbled in communication from one person to the next, details changed here and there etc. (the telephone effect) until it became the bogus story it is now
  • Because they’re schmucks

Take your pick.

5

Man, I forgot about impressing chicks. That also might very well be it.

6

Did you know that the last words of the flight instuctor on Cory Lidle’s plane to the Teterboro air control were “Allah akbar”?

7

I don’t know, but they finally pissed me off enough to start deleting them this week, just like other spam, before they get to my users inboxes. The other day someone at work forwarded a chain letter to all 150 people in our organization, the next day someone else forwarded the same exact email to the same 150 people, then later that day a third person forwarded it to a random group (I guess her friends) at work. So within 24 hours everyone got the same damn email twice and some got it three times.
So I said F this and put a filter on outgoing mail and stopped 7 or 8 other people from sending the chain letter to their friends (outside work). I’m tired of people wasting time looking for Penny Brown and getting emails telling me that Microsoft will give me $200 if forward an email to 25 people.

This page is a nice response to people that forward this stuff: http://www.thanksno.com/ :smiley:

8

Don’t forget a lot of people actually believe this shit and are significantly concerned about it. So the person who originally wrote it out and sent it to people in English may have actually believed they needed to tell their friends. Same for the person who translated it into French.

9

See Urban legend - Wikipedia

Urban legends and folklore predate the Internet by a wide margin. The above link should get you started.
FYI, the above link references The Straight Dope so we now have a circular argument. Woohoo!

10

Unfortunately, I never took classes from Jan Brunvand while I was attending the University of Utah, but in the late 70s, I used to read his weekly column which was carried in the local newspaper.

I had an interesting experience that happened to me (and not to a friend of a friend :stuck_out_tongue: ). In a group of fellow foreign friends (FFF) here in Tokyo, there was one American lady. At one of our FFF parties, she related an amusing incident as having happened at her husband’s work.

Shortly after, I read the exact same incident in a humor book about Foreigners in Japan, where it was clearly written as fiction. I wasn’t sure if it was her unknowingly repeating an urban legend or not, but then sometime after, she told another story from this same book, as having happened in her neighborhood.

In the conversational competition, she was passing off fiction as true stories, which helped some new urban legends.

11

How can there be a factual answer to this question? samclem, can you help us out with that one? I’m sure if I posted this thread it would be buried under the internet basement.

12

Why do people write and release computer viruses? Why do they do anything pernicious?

13

I suspect one of the main reasons is scientific curiosity.

Seriously.

I think most of the people who do it are wondering, “What would happen if I set one of these loose on the world? How long would it take to get it back in my own mailbox? How long to see derivative versions? Would it get mentioned on Snopes? Or would it just disapear into the aether, never to be seen again?”

Things like translations and new details are just tracking devices, a way of marking all the versions that come from the one you created. And of course, if you do see it again, in your inbox or on Snopes, you’ve achieved a little bit of fame (or at least infamy), you’ve created something successful–a surviving meme.

No, I’ve never sent one of these things; I despise them, and send a link to Snopes to anyone who sends me one. But I have wondered about these sorts of things. All it would take for me to do it is a much less active conscience.

14

Disclaimer: I do not profess to know the true origin of this urban legend. But let’s take a look at a plausible route it might have taken.

Conversation 1: To people are reading in the newspaper about the latest senseless gang-related killing in their hometown

Alice: Why the heck would they have killed that lady? She didn’t do anything to them.
Bob: You never know with these crazies. Heck, maybe they just didn’t like that she flicked her headlights at them, or something.

Conversation #2, at the coffee machine at work the next day:
Carol: Did you hear about the lady killed by that gang yesterday?
Alice: Yeah, Bob figures they just killed her because she flicked her lights at them, or something.

Conversation #3, Carol meets a friend for dinner:
Carol: Hey, did you hear that the gangs are killing folks who flick their lights at them?
Dave: Wow, the depravity of some people. Why would they do that?
Carol: I dunno, death’s like some kind of game with them.

Conversation #4, Dave gets a call from his sister
Dave: Havve you heard about the latest killing “game” the gangs are playing? They drive around, and the first person to flick their lights at them, they kill.
Ellen: Why would they do that?
Dave: I dunno, maybe that’s how they initiate new members or something.

Conversation #5, Ellen e-mails a classmate
Ellen: Make sure not to flick your headlights at any other cars, it might be full of gangsters. The way they’re initiating new members now is they drive around with their lights off, and the first person to flick their lights at them, they kill.
Frank: Are you sure about that?
Ellen: My cousin Glenda’s a police officer, I’m sure she’d know all about it. Here’s her e-mail, just ask her!

Conversation #6, Frank hasn’t bothered to confirm yet, but he sends the e-mail on anyway:
Frank: Make sure not to flick your headlights at any other cars, it might be full of gangsters. The way they’re initiating new members now is they drive around with their lights off, and the first person to flick their lights at them, they kill. For more information, contact Officer Glenda, glenda@police.quebec.ca, 555-0000.

And presto, you have your fully-formed urban legend. At no stage in this process did anyone say anything dishonest; everyone is just passing on the story as they know it. But what with everyone adding a new level of speculation, in only six conversations, we’ve gone from a single random gang killing to a crime wave of gangsters with their headlights off.

15

There is no definative answer for a question like this. A ton of opinions, but not an answer.

16

I tried to start a couple, to see if they spread. I took care to write ones that did not cause fear or slur anybody or anything, although I failed in that respect, because afterwards I saw that one could have been interpreted as a situation that was the fault of a store that sounded similar to the fictitious store name I made up.

Nothing pernicious intended, I promise. I just wanted to see if they took off. (they didn’t)

17

I was going to ask if anyone has ever confessed to being the originator of an urban legend but seeing Chronos’s more organic explanation, probably not.

Great post.

18

These days, a lot of the time they do it for money. Write a program that can grab passwords, credit card data, personal details, and you can sell them on.

Or write a program which turns a computer into a zombie machine which can be used to send spam. Sell the program, or the zombie network you’ve created, to spammers.

19

Doesen’t one of our own dopers have a rather well known habit of leaving the dope up at work where mischevious cow-orkers post odd things under his account. Such things could easily account for something like the OP’s example as well.

20

On so many message boards, I’ve seen attempts to start an urban legend, but they all fail. It may be posssible to start a successful UL based on the work of a message board, but you might risk legal action if it involves a false statement about a company or corporation; it would be too easy to track the UL back to the source.

My theory about glurge is that such stories starts as sermons in conservative and nondenominational churches. A congregant hears a sermon that strikes a chord, transcribes it or gets a copy, emails it to HER friends, later recipients gradually tweak it to remove references to it being an allegorical or fictional story, and weeks later it ends up in your mail box, thanks to your secretary or cousin. I think the glurge-inspired poetry has its start in church newsletters; it’s distributed in the same way as the sermons.

I bolded “her” because most of the glurge I recieved comes from women. The cheesy glurge and MIDI filled Geocities pages I stumble across are all maintained by women. If those sites have a reference to location, it’s usually in a smaller town or city in the Southern and Midwestern US. Besides, no real huntin’, fishin’, truck-ownin’ guy would forward a tearjerker involving kids, puppies, pastors, angels and Jesus to his friends.