London, Thanasis Gavos

One of the factors believed to have contributed to the decision of the Princess of Wales Kate Middleton to announce cancer diagnosis via video message was the orgy of rumors and conspiracy theories that had flooded the internet in the past.

According to the data from TikTok and X/Twitterthe posts suggesting that the woman at Prince William’s side at the Windsor Farmers Market, as captured on a citizen’s cellphone, was a hostage, were read at least tens of millions of times.

On TikTok there was a post with this particular short video and with the caption “Do you think this is Kate Middleton?” which was quickly seen by 3.5 million users, with many of the almost 2,000 comments taking it for granted that it was another woman.

Details of the web analytics company BrandMentions cited by the Guardian following the uproar over the doctored photo of the princess with her children, show that social media hashtags alluding to conspiracy theories about Kate Middleton’s whereabouts were so widespread that they reached 400 million users per the world.

These hashtags were most frequently answered on Instagram and then on TikTok. And on Facebook, the hashtags #whereiskate (where is Kate), #katebodydouble (Kate’s doppelgänger) and #katemiddleton had millions of views around the world, with most of them coming from referrals through publications in the Indian magazine India Today and Spanish-speaking world through the Dominican Republic’s Diario Libre newspaper!

Kate Middleton’s death theory which was created and floated by an Instagram account in the US was read more than 26 million times on that particular platform and on TikTok in less than ten days.

This theory was then raised by an English-language newspaper in Pakistan, with the editor using a name that appears as the author of 50 articles about the British royal family in recent times, but with no other online footprint, i.e. no social media account networking.

This particular editor’s article claim about Kate Middleton’s death (or King Charles’s) reproduced news account of X that has received the blue tick of authenticity from the platform.

Speaking to TimesProfessor of Social Psychology at the University of Kent Karen Douglas commented that Kate Middleton’s absence from public view was one “perfect condition” for conspiracy theories to flourish: “A very famous person seems to be being ignored and people want to know why. They want to know the truth and don’t feel good about being in the dark.”.

The assistant professor of Social Psychology at his University Nottingham’s Daniel Jolley added, speaking to the Guardian, that these conspiracy theories are popular why also contain its element “fun”. As he explained, “it’s like being in the movies, this detective element, ‘is it true or not?’ – that’s kind of exciting.”

One of the first to file on social platforms theory about Kate Middleton’s marriage to Windsor Market was Matt Wallacean American “conspiracy theorist” who, among other things has previously claimed that Taylor Swift and George Soros have run a pro-globalisation conspiracy headquartered in a Glasgow museum…

He initially developed his theory in Rumble websitea video posting platform that is very popular among far-right organizations. The link to the video he posted on X had nearly 10 million views.

Clicking on this initial claim another X user went one step further, naming the “savior” as Heidi Egan, known for her resemblance to the Princess of Wales. Ms Egan was forced to deny the allegation.

Despite assurances from social media companies to take measures to combat disinformation, high-profile conspiracy theories are still treated as “high-value content,” noted Imran Ahmed, director of the Center for Countering Digital Hate in the US and UK. “So they reward them with more visibility,” he added, referring to the algorithm that pushes controversial posts to more users.

Speaking again to the Times, Mr. Ahmed noted: “Human psychology has a natural tendency toward epistemological anxiety, that is, man’s deep desire for certainty in situations in which he does not know what the truth is and has no way of finding it. learn. Conspiracies encourage this because they offer the promise of truth without ever actually delivering it. It’s like junk food – it gives you instant satisfaction but doesn’t really fill you up, encouraging you to engage more and more. And these platforms know that, and that’s why they see conspiracies as high-value content.”

The danger is that the more one is exposed to an unfounded theory, the more likely one is to accept it as fact. This is the phenomenon that human psychology researchers call the “fictitious truth effect”.

Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Bristol Stefan Lewandowski observed in the Guardian that “the fact that many people believe (a conspiracy theory) gives rise to other people to believe it and suddenly because everyone else believes it then we will say there is a dose of truth. It’s self-sustaining.”

This vicious cycle continued, to a lesser extent, even after 42-year-old Kathryn’s cancer confessional video.

On TikTok, X and Reddit, the theory that the video did not actually show Kate Middleton but a virtual princess created by artificial intelligence quickly gained ground and millions of views.

Twitter’s former head of UK and Europe Bruce Daisley commented that not much could be done to tackle “gossip” and the spread of misinformation by individual users. The important issue that can be addressed, he continued, is how X’s algorithms push untrustworthy content to users.

As he noted, the problem of showing popular posts to users who aren’t interested in them and aren’t looking for them, as happened with the Kate theories, has grown since Elon Musk took over X. “He has shown that he doesn’t care about the consequences and that everything is allowed,” commented Mr Daisley.

The Times notes that since Musk’s arrival, his platform has “distanced itself” from professional news-gathering journalistic sources. The same, according to the newspaper, has started to happen on Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, that is, on Instagram and Facebook (where the closure of the Facebook News service is imminent).

However, representatives of the two companies rejected these accusations in their statements to the Times, referring also to the reproduction of conspiracy theories by the traditional media.

And the Sun newspaper revealed a few days ago the shadowy social media activity against the princely couple of Wales by a well-organized and fanatical group of followers of the Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle, called #Sussexsquad

Some of the theories that this group allegedly spread were that Kate Middleton was in hiding because she had suffered domestic violence from her husband, that she was in the process of a divorce, or that she was waiting to recover from plastic surgery.

The newspaper additionally hosted testimonies from three social media users who claim they have been bullied and threatened by these trolls for criticizing their posts.

It is emphasized that there is no suggestion that the action of this group is supported or even known to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.