Duchess Kate has long attracted unproven rumors. She pressured art galleries to remove royal portraits. She broke up with her husband! Changed her hairstyle to cover up rumors of her pregnancy! She didn't give birth to a daughter!
Speculation has been heating up this year. Middleton, now Duchess Kate, had kept her quiet since Christmas. Kensington Palace said she was recovering from her “planned abdominal surgery” and that she was unlikely to resume royal duties until after Easter. Conspiracy theorists had more sinister ideas. They said the only explanation for the future queen's long absence is that she is missing, dying or dead and someone is trying to cover it up.
“Kate Middleton is probably dead,” read one post with an X, flanked by skull and screaming emojis.
In a fabricated death, the princess has been described as a clone, shadow warrior, AI-generated avatar, or otherwise non-living by a number of internet sleuths, from President Biden to Elon Musk, in recent months. joins many other celebrities and public figures. , they are breathing people.
For many who spread falsehoods, it's harmless fun. It's a casual joke that takes just a few clicks and is a jackpot for meme generators. But some spend “countless hours” chasing down other skeptics and demanding that celebrities produce living proof.
Whatever the motivation, what lingers is the urge to question reality, misinformation experts say. Recently, a similar sense of suspicion has contaminated conversations about elections, race, health care, and climate, despite widespread and incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.
Currently, much of the internet disagrees about basic facts, and this phenomenon can lead to increased political polarization, distrust of institutions such as news and academics, and distort people's perceptions of the truth. This is exacerbated by the rise of artificial intelligence and other technologies.
Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of media ethics and digital platforms at the University of Oregon, said that in this environment, celebrity conspiracy theories have become a way to control “a really volatile, frightening and disturbing moment.”
“The darkness that characterizes our politics will find its way into more light-hearted expressions of speculation,” she said. “It just speaks to the sense of insecurity in the world.”
The history of pop culture is full of posthumous claims that deceased celebrities (like Elvis and Tupac) are still alive. This time it's the other way around.
In recent weeks, there has been a frenzy of talk online that the Duchess Kate is dead or in a coma, but the palace has dismissed the rumors as “ridiculous”. Internet sleuths have determined that the photo of Duchess Kate in a car with her mother and her husband is actually a different woman, with the mole on the princess's face missing.
Last week, the palace released photos of the royal family and their three children on Mother's Day, sparking further speculation. Inconsistencies in her portrait's clothing and background led to rumors that the image was taken from an old photo to hide her true whereabouts. By the time Duchess Kate apologized for editing the image, the hashtag #WhereIsKateMiddleton was circulating on social media.
Recently, another video showing Duchess Kate and her husband in a store has been scrutinized by conspiracy theorists, showing that Duchess Kate is too fuzzy, too healthy, too thin and with flat hair to really be a princess. , claimed that he did not appear to be protected by bodyguards. After a video of the Union flag being flown at half-mast at Buckingham Palace began circulating this week, social media users branded it a sign that either the princess or King Charles III, who has cancer, had passed away. I interpreted it. The video turned out to be from a building in Istanbul in 2022, after Queen Elizabeth II passed away.
recycled footage, easily computer-generated images, most viewers' general reluctance to fact-check claims that are easily proven false, and even foreign disinformation operations. even can serve to stir up doubts about a celebrity's presence or independence. There are rumors that Mr. Biden is played by multiple masked actors. Including Jim Carrey. According to rapper Kanye West (who is often said to be a clone himself), Musk is one of up to 30 clones. Last year, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin was caught asking a question about a rumored AI-generated version of himself during a streamed press conference.
Moya Luckett, a media historian at New York University, says voyeurs into the lives of celebrities used to be carefully curated and distributed through a limited number of media outlets. When rumors spread in 1969 that the Beatles had died years earlier and been replaced by doppelgangers, few celebrities faced as much uproar as Paul McCartney. Mr. McCartney has tried multiple times to prove his presence on the death coil, as supposed evidence such as the winking lyrics of a Beatles song or a secret message contained in an inverted track captivated the public. He withstood interviews and photo shoots.
Celebrity content is widespread and constantly available these days. Public engagement is an important (and often requested) part of public relations. Privacy is not. Reality is modified and filtered so that while some celebrities appear ageless, unwarranted suspicion is aroused for those who are not.
When fans believe that a celebrity is suffering, Luckett said, uncovering the case is treated as a communal bond born of a “sense of entitlement disguised as concern.” She calls this behavior “concern trolling.”
“It's about wanting to control how this person reacts to me, wanting to be part of their story. I've already exhausted all the information that's out there, and now I want more. “There's a need,” she said, noting that a similar impulse animates the current obsession with true crime stories. “I don’t think I necessarily want to save or help.”
Britney Spears, fresh out of a restrictive conservatorship, shared a series of unfiltered and often bizarre posts last year that some fans took as evidence she was being replaced.
So-called Britney truth-seekers analyzed possible discrepancies in Ms. Spears' tattoos, gaps in her teeth and eye color. On one forum, a thread was titled “She's been cloned!” It gathered nearly 400 comments. The popular hashtag warps one of Spears' most famous lyrics to #itsbritneyglitch, paralleling claims that lookalikes are using her AI filters to imitate the singer online. is displayed.
Spears, who was photographed in Las Vegas this year, has repeatedly denied lying about her death or her encounter with it. “It really pisses me off that it's legal to make up a story about me almost dying,” she posted on Instagram last February. A few months later, she posted (and later deleted): “I'm not a dead person!!!” She was quoted as telling People magazine in October that she was “no more conspiracies, no more lies.”
Conspiracy theory peddlers are not necessarily believers. Some of the leading voices behind the voter fraud lie have admitted in court that their claims were false. Ed Cutlach Spencer, a professor of digital culture at Queen Mary University of London, said publicly trying to debunk fake celebrities can feel like a joke.
This month, a long-standing conspiracy theory about singer Avril Lavigne resurfaced in a tongue-in-cheek podcast by comedian Joanne McNally, whose first episode was titled “What the Hell.” The claim that Lavigne died and was replaced by a doppelganger originated from a Brazilian blog called “Avril Esta Morta,'' or “Avril is Dead,'' which itself said “The world is dead.'' “It's easy to believe things, no matter what they are.” How strange they look! ” In 2017, more than 700 people signed an online petition calling for Lavigne and his girlfriend to provide “living proof.”
“Fans themselves are vocal performers. The web, and TikTok in particular, is a platform for performance,” Dr. Spencer said. “What's important is the creation and distribution of content, and all of this exists as a kind of scene. It's about the economy of attention more than anything.”
Dr Spencer, who wrote an academic paper on rumors about Beyoncé, said it was possible to debunk celebrity conspiracy theories. In 2020, a Florida politician accused the singer of lying about being black “in order to expose” her identity, saying she was actually an Italian named Anne-Marie Latrassi and that Black Lives Matter He said he was involved in a deep state conspiracy involving the movement.
Her supporters, the BeyHive, have adopted “lastrassi” as a term of endearment, incorporating it into fan fiction and online tributes. Beyoncé herself also addressed her claims that her husband Jay-Z is part of a secret society, saying in “Formation” that she sings, “I hate all the clichés of Illuminati chaos.” ing.
“It all comes back to the question of authenticity and the crisis of trust in people's perceptions of authenticity,” Dr. Spencer said. “People are always questioning what they see.”
