Kate Middleton has long been a magnet for unsubstantiated rumors: She pressured an art gallery to remove a royal portrait! She divorced her husband! She changed her hairstyle to distract from the pregnancy rumors! She did not give birth to her daughter!
This year, the speculation went beyond. Mrs. Middleton—now Catherine, Princess of Wales—has been lying low since Christmas. Kensington Palace said she is recovering from “a scheduled abdominal operation” and is unlikely to resume her royal duties until after Easter. Conspiracy theorists had other, more sinister ideas. The only explanation for the future queen’s long absence, they said, was that she was missing, dying, or had died, and that someone was trying to cover it up.
“KATE MIDDLETON IS PROBABLY DEAD,” read one post on X, with the text flanked by skulls and screaming emojis.
In her fabricated death, the princess joins a number of other celebrities and public figures — from President Biden to Elon Musk — who many online sleuths have declared in recent months to be clones, body doubles, AI-generated avatars or otherwise they are not alive. , breathing people who are.
For many of the people pushing the lies, it’s harmless fun: occasional gum that only takes a few clicks, a bonus for memes. Others, however, spend “countless hours” on the trail, following other skeptics down rabbit holes and demanding that celebrities provide proof of life.
Whatever the motivation, what lurks is an urge to question reality, disinformation experts say. Lately, despite extensive and incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, the same sense of suspicion has infected debates about elections, race, health care, and the climate.
Much of the internet now disagrees on basic facts, a phenomenon exacerbated by intensifying political polarization, distrust of institutions like news and academia, and the rise of artificial intelligence and other technologies that can distort people’s perception for the truth.
In such an environment, celebrity conspiracy theories have become a way to take control of “a really precarious, scary and disturbing moment,” said Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of media ethics and digital platforms at the University of Oregon.
“The darkness that characterizes our politics will creep into the most honest formulations of speculation,” he said. “It just speaks to a sense of unease in the world.”
Pop culture history is littered with posthumous claims that famous dead people (like Elvis and Tupac) are still alive. Now comes the reverse.
In recent weeks, frenzied online chatter claimed Catherine was dead or even in an induced coma – a rumor the palace dismissed as “ridiculous”. Netizens said the photos of Catherine in cars with her mother and husband were actually another woman who didn’t have the princess’ facial moles.
Last week, the palace sparked further speculation with a Mother’s Day picture of the royal family with their three children. Inconsistencies in the portrait’s clothing and background have led to rumors that the image was lifted from old photographs in an attempt to hide its true place. By the time Catherine apologized for editing the image, the hashtag #WhereIsKateMiddleton had gone viral on social media.
Another video of Catherine and her husband in a shop in recent days was combed by conspiracy theorists who said she looked too blurry, too healthy, too thin, too wide-haired, too unprotected by bodyguards to really be the princess. This week, after a video showing the Union flag at half-mast at Buckingham Palace began to circulate, social media users interpreted the video as a sign that either the princess or King Charles III, who is suffering from cancer, had die. The video turned out to be a building in Istanbul in 2022, after the death of Queen Elizabeth II.
Recycled footage, easily computer-generated images, the general reluctance of most listeners to verify easily revealed facts, and even foreign disinformation efforts can help fuel doubts about the existence or independence of celebrities. Biden is rumored to be played by several masked actors, including Jim Carrey. Mr. Musk is one of up to 30 clones, according to rapper Kanye West (himself often said to be a clone). Last year, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin was confronted during a streamed news conference by an AI-generated version of himself and asked about his rumored body doubles.
Glimpses into the lives of celebrities were once carefully curated and distributed through a limited set of media outlets, said Moya Luckett, a media historian at New York University. Few public figures faced the kind of uproar that Paul McCartney did in 1969 when a rumor circulated that the Beatle had died years earlier and been replaced by a doppelgänger. The purported clues – winking lyrics and secret messages in upside-down bits of Beatles songs – so enthralled audiences that Mr McCartney sat through several interviews and photo shoots to prove his presence on the obituary.
These days, celebrity content is widely and constantly available. Public engagement is a critical (and often requested) part of the publicity engine. privacy is not. Reality is retouched and filtered, allowing certain public figures to appear ageless, while drawing undue suspicion to those who do not.
When fans believe a famous person is in distress, breaking out is seen as an activity of shared engagement born of “a sense of entitlement in the guise of concern,” Dr Luckett said. He calls the practice “concern trolling.”
“It’s about wanting to control how that person responds to me, wanting to be part of their narrative: I’ve already exhausted all the information that’s out there, and now I need more,” he said, noting that a similar impulse animates the current obsessed with true crime stories. “I don’t think you necessarily want to save or help.”
Britney Spears, fresh from a restrictive conservative service, shared a series of unfiltered and often wacky posts last year that some fans read as evidence that she had been replaced by a stand-in.
So-called Britney truthers broke down what they thought were discrepancies in Ms. Spears’ tattoos, gaps in her teeth and eye color. On a forum, a thread titled “Clone Done!” garnered nearly 400 comments. A popular hashtag twisted one of Ms Spears’ best-known lyrics into #itsbritneyglitch, which emerged alongside claims that a look-alike was using an AI filter to impersonate the singer online.
Ms Spears, who was filmed in Las Vegas this year, has repeatedly rejected lies about her death or what comes with death. “It makes me sick to my stomach that it’s legal for people to make up stories about me almost dying,” she wrote on Instagram in February of last year. A few months later, he posted (and then deleted) “I’m not dead!!!” He was quoted by People in October as saying, “No more conspiracy, no more lies.”
Conspiracy theory peddlers aren’t necessarily believers: Some of the leading voices behind voter fraud lies have admitted in court that their claims were false. Ed Katrak Spencer, a lecturer in digital culture at Queen Mary University of London, said publicly trying to expose a fake celebrity can feel playful.
This month, a long-running conspiracy theory involving singer Avril Lavigne resurfaced in an abstract podcast by comedian Joanne McNally, who called her first episode “What the Hell.” The claim – that Ms Lavigne has died and been replaced by a doppelgänger – came from a Brazilian blog called “Avril Está Morta” or “Avril Is Dead”, which noted the same “how prone people are to believe things, regardless off topic”. how strange they look.’ In 2017, more than 700 people signed an online petition urging Ms Lavigne and her double to provide “proof of life”.
“The fans are the performers themselves. the web and especially TikTok are performance platforms,” Dr Spencer said. “It’s more about content creation and circulation, all of which exists as a kind of scene. It’s about the attention economy more than anything else.”
Dr Spencer, who has worked on academic papers on Beyoncé-related rumours, said it was possible to debunk celebrity conspiracy theories. In 2020, a politician in Florida accused the singer of faking her black heritage “for exposure” and said she was actually an Italian woman named Ann Marie Lastrassi who was involved in a deep state plot involving the Black Lives Matter movement.
Her supporters, the BeyHive, adopted “Lastrassi” as a term of endearment and incorporated it into fan and online tributes. Beyoncé herself has made claims that she and husband Jay-Z are in a secret society, singing on “Formation” that “y’all hate with this Illuminati mess.”
“It all comes back to the question of authenticity and the crisis of confidence in people’s perception of authenticity,” Dr Spencer said. “People are constantly questioning what they see.”
