Kate Middleton & the Conspiratization of Modern Mass Communications

Photo from The Atlantic

As someone who uses TikTok more than a grown woman with a full time job should, I have been following the ‘Where is Kate?’ discourse for a bit.  But over the weekend I started seeing the topic pop up in all types of group chats, texts and my TikTok has gone into overdrive on Middleton-watch. 

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, (a) congrats on your luddite-light lifestyle, (b) a short summary: Kate was last seen in public at the end of December, and in mid-January the Palace announced she was hospitalized for “planned abdominal surgery.”  They also said she’d resume her public duties “after Easter.”  In the intervening months, the discourse about the ‘real’ reason she was gone started (seemingly) as a joke (a BBL, bangs, etc.) but grew steadily. It reached a fever pitch last week when Kate, through the @princeandprincessofwales Instagram account, put up an altered photo to celebrate UK Mother’s Day. The speculation and conspiracies have since gone wild and the discourse has moved far beyond the niche royal-watching accounts. On March 10, several international news agencies retracted the image because it was  manipulated. 

The conspiracy has quickly grown wings with folks like @HouseInHabit on Instagram ‘just asking questions’ and @Geezerontok on TikTok alleging that Kate was pregnant with Thomas Kingston’s baby. Kingston, the husband of King Charles’ second cousin, died by suicide on February 27, and there is absolutely no evidence that this is true. A tweet alleging Kate’s face is actually taken from an old Vogue cover has 47M views on X, (though I’ll note that there are differences between the two upon closer inspection.) CBS News brought it up in the White House briefing. 

Timeline from ABC News

The intensity with which the NCIS-trained masses started to pick apart the photo and the unironic glee with which some of my friends identified themselves as Kate Middleton truthers hit me like a QAnon-labeled brick. I’m not the only one, Helen Lewis wrote an article in The Atlantic titled “QAnon for Wine Moms”.

I personally do not care about Kate Middleton or the British Monarchy anymore than I care about any other human who shares this earth. To me, it seems they are an economically-beneficial project of the British tourism office. I myself purchased a Christmas ornament of a corgi wearing a crown on my most recent trip to the UK - it’s so cute. 

But I also think that a manipulated photo should be retracted - and the very fact that it is put out by the royals is perpetuating the post-truthiness of our world. AI, coupled with the perverse incentives of virality (capitalism) and manufactured chaos (foreign actors), has destroyed our confidence in truth while also fueling our obsession with finding the ‘real truth.’ The Royal Family’s sordid history of obfuscation supports people’s arguments that this is a massive coverup - they’ve created what Charlie Warzel called a “trust vacuum.” Everywhere we look there is a pervasive sense of unease and suspicion about the information that is presented to us, but how it is manifesting is pushing us further away from reality not closer - into conspiracy land. 

To take a quick detour for a second, one of my favorite phrases for describing the current political agenda of the Republican party is an effort to create the “specter of impropriety.” It’s the ‘just asking questions’ methodology - is there any actual evidence Joe Biden did something improper with regards to Ukraine/Hunter? No. But did years of Republicans asking about it sear the idea that he *did* into the minds of many Americans? Yes.

If this were another year and another mother’s day, the discourse over a photoshopped image of Kate Middleton would not have pierced the mainstream. What makes this manipulation interesting is the cauldron of conspiracies bubbling up online, the greater context of “Where is Kate?” 

A conspiracy is a secret plot with malign goals - it hinges on the premises that there are no coincidences, that the simplest answer is not the right answer and that true intentions are always malevolent. Today’s conspiracies aren’t whole-cloth manufactured narratives, they are spun from truth: people do edit photos, the press did not give Meghan Markle space when she wanted it, the British Press does have a symbiotic relationship with the Royals, celebrities are weird about announcing separations and more.  

The point I want to make here is not about the substance of Kate Middleton’s photo, or her absence even, but rather about the conspiracy culture that we are experiencing surrounding it. The infrastructure of social media and the hunger of a post-truth (frankly nihilistic) audience means that every mass event is turned into a conspiracy. Sometimes I truly look at these social media posts and think - you need a hobby! And then I realize… this is your hobby!! It’s what Taylor Swift commoditized so well. 

@HouseInHabit is someone we will continue to discuss this year, but she’s one of the most effective purveyors of white woman conspiracydom. She became famous as a ‘citizen journalist’ covering the Depp v. Heard trial and those of Epstein & Maxwell. She has catapulted herself into a massive influencer - 1 million followers on Instagram and 300,00 on Substack - that’s trained her audience to trust that if they listen to her, they will hear the ‘real’ story. A follower DM’d me, “I and so many followers used to love her ‘coverage’ of celebrities and then it slowly (quickly??) turned into this conspiracy-theory platform where the subject or actual facts no longer mattered, what mattered [was] the storytelling and the feeling you got like you were watching some big mystery be solved. It’s addicting! and thrilling!” She’s now moved into news, she’s being courted by Trump, and serves as a defacto social media manager by RFK Jr. The Wall Street Journal recently wrote an article, She Was a Mommy Blogger. Now She’s Covering Trump and Kennedy on the Trail—and Making a Fortune.

The right has been working conspiracy land for a while, not just QAnon and Trump’s claims of an election being rigged against him, but every little thing is a vast conspiracy of us verse them. It’s gas stoves and taking their guns. Tucker Carleson today put out a theory that AOC and the DOJ are in cahoots to ban X by citing the TikTok legislation moving on Capitol Hill. (Also, fwiw that bill is not a ‘ban’ but a forced sale/divestment of Chinese interests, noting that U.S. private equity already owns a significant portion of ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company. I think the legislation has 1st Amendment issues, but I also think the degree to which people are being manipulated by our corporate overlords <cough cough, remember that credit card points bill? I’m still salty> is exactly the problem.) 

We recently saw Rep. Katie Porter try (and fail) to trot out the “rigged” language when describing her failed bid for California Senate. But that doesn’t mean the incentive structure, in all it’s fun and glory, isn’t flourishing on the left as well. Wellness influencers promote anti-science and anti-vaccine conspiracies that have pushed some leftists so far around the political circle they are now conservatives (or RFK supporters). 

The thing about conspiracy culture is it’s loud and fun and chaotic and a lot closer to Real Housewives than the evening news. But it’s also a problem. Every mass media event is now a conspiracy and truth is unmoored. The Middleton affair is but a stop on this train ride, but I fear where we are headed.