Early Multimodal Prediction of Cross-Lingual Meme Virality on Reddit: A Time-Window Analysis
Memes are a central part of online culture, yet their virality remains difficult to predict, especially in cross-lingual settings. We present a large-scale, time-series dataset of 46,578 Reddit memes collected from 25 meme-centric subreddits across eight language groups, with more than one million engagement tracking points. We propose a data-driven definition of virality based on a Hybrid Score that normalises engagement by community size and integrates dynamic features such as velocity and acceleration. This approach directly addresses the field's reliance on static, simple volume-based thresholds with arbitrary cut-offs. Building on this target, we construct a multimodal feature set that combines Visual, Textual, Contextual, Network, and Temporal signals, including structured annotations from a multimodal LLM to scale cross-lingual content labelling in a consistent way. We benchmark interpretable baselines (XGBoost, MLP) against end-to-end deep models (BERT, InceptionV3, CLIP) across early observation windows from 30 to 420 minutes. Our best model, a multimodal XGBoost classifier, achieves a PR AUC of 0.43 at 30 minutes and 0.80 at 420 minutes, indicating that early prediction of meme virality is feasible even under strong class imbalance. The results reveal a clear Content Ceiling, where content-only and deep multimodal baselines plateau at low PR AUC, while structural Network and Temporal features are necessary to surpass this limit. A SHAP-based temporal analysis further uncovers an evidentiary transition, where early predictions are dominated by network priors (author and community context), and later predictions increasingly rely on temporal dynamics (velocity, acceleration) as engagement accumulates. Overall, we reframe meme virality as a dynamic, path-dependent process governed by exposure and early interaction patterns rather than by intrinsic content alone.