What is it that makes them decide to label these events "folk"?

I will leave it to our pantheon of Great Philosophers to answer that one, Howard. All I've done here is to report on the facts of the case and conclude that Folk Song is demonstrably different from Traditional Song and make a few suggestions as to why that might be.

Elsewhere on Mudcat we find this actuality of Folk readily and rightly celebrated, such as in the love the young people writing folk thread, where my only concern might be with the comments regarding the artist's evident youth, comments which reflect the general Folk Demographic which I feel (and fear) informs much of reactionary carping we have seen on this thread.

That said, I find myself in generally agreement with many of the points put forward here, especially those of Jim Carroll & Don Firth, even though I feel the conflation of Folk Song and Traditional Song is no longer appropriate to the realities of either, nor yet helpful to our understanding of them in terms of ethnomusicological phenomena. Maybe this is why the International Folk Music Council changed their name to the International Council for Traditional Music, the stated aims of which are to further the study, practice, documentation, preservation and dissemination of traditional music, including folk, popular, classical and urban music, and dance of all countries.

That makes perfect sense to me; to look at music the way it is, not how we might wish it to be according to some long redundant and essentially divisive criteria.