‘Where is #katemiddleton?’: theories on Kate’s
whereabouts go global
Data reveals scale of conspiracies after Kensington
Palace’s release of altered image of princess with her children
Esther
Addley, Dan Milmo and Andrew Roth
Wed 20 Mar
2024 18.08 GMT
When the
Sun published images of the Prince and Princess of Wales shopping at a farm
shop at the weekend, it said it was doing so “in a bid to end weeks of online
speculation which has seen wild conspiracy theories about Kate spread
unchecked”.
If that was
the aim, it certainly has not worked. “Do you believe this is Kate Middleton?”
is the caption of one TikTok video that has been viewed 3.5m times. “Not Kate.
Nooo,” reads one of the almost 2,000 comments. “I’m not even big on the royals
and I knew it wasn’t her,” says someone else. Another video, titled: “Where is
#katemiddleton? Cause that’s not here! [sic]”, has 1.1m views.
Ten days
after Kensington Palace released a photograph of Catherine with her children –
which it later was forced to admit had been altered – the enormous scale of the
conspiracies it has fed and generated is becoming apparent.
The
princess’s whereabouts, and the more outlandish theories attached to that
question, have been the subject of frenzied online speculation, as illustrated
by data seen by the Guardian. According to BrandMentions, a company that
monitors the spread of hashtags and keywords online, over the past seven days
the hashtags #whereiskate #katebodydouble and #katemiddleton have been used on
social media accounts and webpages with a total reach of 400 million people, as
measured by factors such as account followers.
The
hashtags were mentioned 5,400 times, with Instagram accounting for more than
eight out of 10 mentions, followed by TikTok, which accounted for 5% of
mentions. Posts with those hashtags have been shared 2.3m times and liked 2.2m
times.
The
speculation has been truly global, with the biggest reach for the three
hashtags on Facebook coming from the India Today news magazine page, while one
of the biggest reaches on Instagram is from the account of Diario Libre, a
newspaper in the Dominican Republic, which has 1.8 million followers.
One example
of how fake news starts and spreads is the supposed revelation of an imminent
royal announcement earlier this week. After rumours of a death or divorce in
the royal family began to spread on social media, the hashtag
#royalannouncement began to trend on X early on Monday morning.
Those
rumours appear to have originated with the TikTok and Instagram site
Popapologists, run by a duo who describe themselves as podcasting sisters
Lauren and Chan, who are apparently from the US. On 11 March the pair posted
the first in what is now a 32-part series entitled “Where TF is Kate
Middleton?!?!?!”, which has now been viewed 6.1m times. The series has
attracted total views of more than 20m on TikTok alone.
In one
video posted on 16 March, the pair said they had received “insider information”
that BBC Events had “reportedly been notified to be ready for an extremely
important royal announcement at any moment”. “Do you know what BBC Events is
responsible for covering? Weddings, coronations and funerals. Is there any
world where Kate is no longer with us?” The claims spread widely, with the
factchecking site Snopes identifying Popapologists as a key source.
Those
reports were picked up by the News International, an English-language Pakistani
newspaper that writes extensively on the royal family. Its bylined writer Wells
Oster does not have any profile on LinkedIn, Facebook or other social networks,
but has written more than 50 articles on the royal family this week.
On 16 March
Oster published a news article headlined “Royal family cues British media for
major announcement ‘at any moment’”, citing Popapologists. Screenshots of that
article then began to pop up on X, where several accounts cited the report
alongside reports that Charles or another member of the royal family may have
died.
One
blue-tick verified account @UKR_Report, that has 22,600 followers, wrote: “It
is estimated that Princess Kate of Wales, a member of the United Kingdom royal
family, has died.” Like the report the same day of the death of King Charles,
which was picked up and amplified by major news outlets in Russia, the report
was entirely fake.
Daniel
Jolley, assistant professor in social psychology at Nottingham University, says
that while we often talk about conspiracy theories in terms of the
psychological needs they meet in those who hold them, the Princess of Wales
rumours are particularly potent “because they are also entertaining”.
He added:
“It feels like you’re in a movie, with you as the investigator. That sleuthing
element – ooh could they or couldn’t they? That’s kind of exciting … And in the
context of economic inequality, which can breed anomie, the idea of societies
crumbling – it all feels that this is possible.”
Stephan
Lewandowsky, professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Bristol,
whose research centres on the spread of myths and misinformation, says: “One of
the issues is that you then get into feedback loops, where the fact that a lot
of people believe it then gives other people reason to believe things. And then
all of a sudden, just because everybody else is believing it, people will say,
there has to be some truth to that because my neighbour believes it. It feeds
on itself.”
Much of the
current frenzy will subside when Catherine resumes royal duties, “so in a
sense, who cares, right?” says Lewandowsky. “The world isn’t going to be
altered by whatever this person does. But the real problem is, of course, that
it contributes to this blizzard of disinformation, misinformation, misleading
information on social media – and it makes it increasingly difficult to
differentiate between truth and falsehood. That is, in the
long run, very concerning.”
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