Kate Middleton, Britney Spears and the Internet trolls who doubt their existence

Kate Middleton has long been a magnet for unproven rumors:

pressured an art gallery to remove a royal portrait!

She separated from her husband!

She changed her hairstyle to distract from pregnancy rumors!

She didn’t give birth to her daughter!

This year, speculation has skyrocketed. Middleton – now Catherine, Princess of Wales – has been in self-isolation since Christmas.

Kensington Palace said he was recovering from “a planned abdominal operation” and was unlikely to resume royal duties until after Easter.

THE conspiranoids They had other, more sinister ideas.

The only explanation for the future queen’s long absence, they said, was that she was missing, dying or dead, and that someone was trying to hide the fact.

“KATE MIDDLETON IS MAYBE DEAD,” read a post on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, with the text flanked by skulls and screaming emoticons.

With her invented death, the princess joins a string of celebrities and public figures, starting with the president Joe Biden Until Elon Musk– which in recent months have been declared clones, stand-ins, AI-generated avatars or anything other than a living, breathing person.

For many of the people who spread these falsehoods, it’s harmless fun: a casual investigation that lasts only a few clicks, a goldmine for meme generators.

Others, however, dedicate “countless hours” in research, following other skeptics down rabbit holes and demanding celebrities provide proof of a lifetime.

Whatever the motivation, what persists is the desire to question reality, disinformation experts say.

Lately, despite much incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, the same sense of suspicion has tainted conversations about elections, race, health care, and climate.

Much of the Internet now disagrees on basic facts, a phenomenon exacerbated by intensifying political polarization, distrust in institutions like the media and academia, and the rise of artificial intelligence and other technologies that can distort perceptions of truth.

In that environment, celebrity conspiracy theories have become a way to take control of “a really precarious, scary and disturbing time,” said Whitney Phillips, an associate professor of media ethics and digital platforms at the University of California. ‘Oregon.

In recent weeks, frenzied online chatter claimed Kate was dead or even in an induced coma, a rumor dismissed as “preposterous” by the palace.

Internet sleuths said photos of Kate in the car with her mother and husband were actually of another woman who did not have the princess’s moles on her face.

Last week, the palace sparked further speculation with an image of the princess with her three children for Mother’s Day. Inconsistencies in the portrait’s clothing and background led to rumors that the image had been taken from old photos in an attempt to hide its true whereabouts.

When Kate apologized for editing the image, the hashtag #WhereIsKateMiddleton spread across social media.

Another video of Kate and her husband in a store was reviewed in great detail in recent days by conspiracy theorists who said she looked too blurry, too healthy, too thin, too flat, too defenseless from bodyguards to really be the princess.

This week, after a video began circulating showing the Union flag at half-mast at Buckingham Palace, social media users interpreted the images as a sign that the princess or cancer-stricken King Charles III , they were dead.

It turned out that the video came from youn building in Istanbul in 2022, after the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

Recycled images, easily computer-generated images, the general reluctance of most of the public to verify easily debunked claims, and even foreign disinformation efforts can all contribute to fuel doubts about the existence or independence of celebrities.

Biden is said to be played by several masked actors, including Jim Carrey.

Musk is one of 30 clones, according to rapper Kanye West (he himself is often said to be a clone).

Last year, the Russian president Vladimir Putin During a press conference broadcast live over the Internet, he was confronted by an AI-generated version of himself who asked him about his alleged body lookalikes.

According to Moya Luckett, a media historian at New York University, glimpses into the lives of celebrities were carefully curated and rationed across a limited set of media.

Few public figures have addressed the uproar caused Paul McCartney in 1969, when a rumor circulated that the Beatle had died years earlier and had been replaced by a lookalike.

The alleged evidence – winking lyrics and secret messages on the reverse tracks of Beatles songs – so fascinated the public that McCartney subjected himself to multiple interviews and photo shoots. demonstrate your presence in the mortal world.

Today, celebrity content is widely and consistently available.

Audience engagement is a crucial (and often required) part of the advertising apparatus; privacy is not.

Reality is airbrushed and filtered, allowing some public figures to appear ageless, while raising irrational suspicions about those who don’t.

When fans believe a famous person is in trouble, solving the case is treated as a community-bonding activity born of “feeling entitled to do so behind a facade of concern,” Luckett said.

She calls this practice “concern trolling”.

“It’s about wanting to control how that person responds to me, about wanting to be part of their story: I’ve exhausted all the information available and now I need more,” he explained, underlining that a similar impulse drives the current obsession with true crime stories.

“I don’t think they really want to save or help anyone.”

Conspiracy theory peddlers aren’t necessarily believers: Some of the leading voices behind the election fraud lies have admitted in court that their claims were false.

Ed Katrak Spencer, professor of digital cultures at Queen Mary University of London, said that trying to publicly expose a fake celebrity can be seen as Like a game.

An old conspiracy theory linked to the singer emerged this month Avril Lavigne resurfaced in a tongue-in-cheek podcast by comedian Joanne McNally, who titled her first episode “What the Hell.”

The claim – that Lavigne was dead and was being impersonated by a “doppelgänger”, i.e. a person identical to her – originated from a Brazilian blog called “Avril Esta Morta” or “Avril is dead”, which in turn highlighted “how susceptible the world is to believing things, no matter how strange they seem.

In 2017, more than 700 people signed an online petition calling for Lavigne and her lookalike to provide “proof of life.”

“Fans are noisy actors themselves; the web and especially TikTok are platforms for performance,” Spencer said.

“It’s more about the creation and circulation of content, and all of that exists as a kind of stage. “It’s about the attention economy more than anything else.”

c.2024 The New York Times Company