Kate Middleton joins a Portage Session for her Shaping Us campaign on September 27, 2023.Photo:Samir Hussein/WireImage
Samir Hussein/WireImage
Martin Innes, the director of the Security, Crime and Intelligence Innovation Institute at Cardiff University in Wales, toldNBC NewsandThe New York Timesthat he and his team identified 45 accounts posting about Princess Kate, 42, in a way that hinted the messages were affiliated with Doppelgänger, a Russian disinformation operation.
Innes said the network did not start the speculation but took advantage of the traffic to disperse pro-Russia content and internet dissonance.
“It’s not as though these Russia-linked accounts were driving the story; they were jumping on it,” he told NBC News. “It was already being framed in conspiracy terms, so foreign actors don’t need to set that frame — that’s already there to exploit.”
Kate Middleton visits the Army Training Centre Pirbright on September 16, 2022.Samir Hussein/WireImage
Chatter around Princess Kate’s health and whereabouts amid her private recovery followingabdominal surgeryin January hit a new pitch whenPrince Williamunexpectedly missed a memorial for his late godfather, King Constantine of Greece, on Feb. 27. It’s now understood that Prince William, 41,dropped out of the ceremony due to his wife’s diagnosis.
Innes said they suspected Doppelgänger was at play due to the accounts’ usernames, how they seemed to be created in batches and circulated the same wording. The expert explained that the Russian-linked accounts would sometimes reply to existing posts about Princess Kate on X with pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine content.
Sander van der Linden, a professor of psychology at the University of Cambridge who studies the influence of misinformation, summed up the speculation around Princess Kate as “a perfect cocktail in terms of the things that you need for conspiracy theories to thrive.” Van der Linden pointed to how the Princess of Wales’ Mother’s Day photosparked a PR crisisfurther fueling the fire.
That Sunday, screenshots of a doctored death announcement from the palace made the rounds online and on TikTok,The Mirrorreported.
The British Embassy in Ukraine swiftly refuted the claims made in the Russian reports on the same day, issuing a statement onXdeclaring, “News about the death of King Charles III is fake.”
King Charles and Queen Camilla leave The London Clinic on January 29, 2024.Karwai Tang/WireImage
Karwai Tang/WireImage
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Buckingham Palace also reportedly dismissed the rumors in a statement to the state-run Russian news agency TASS, affirming, “We are happy to confirm that The King is continuing with official and private business,” according to theNew York Post.
This week, both the New York Times and NBC cited a report fromThe Telegraphthat British government officials worried China and Iran were also driving disinformation around Princess Kate in an attempt to destabilize the nation.
If the Mother’s Day photo fiasco is a microcosm of the modern demand for information around the royal family, a former longtime palace aide tells PEOPLE it’s the"curse" of royal life in modern times.
“There was no malintent. But it unleashed up a pent-up feeling that people wanted information — unfortunately, that’s the curse of being a modern royal,” a former longtime palace aide exclusively tells PEOPLE. “It was a complex reaction.”
source: people.com
