Kate Middleton has long been a magnet for unproven rumors: She pressured an art gallery to remove a royal portrait! She is divorced from her husband! She changed her hairstyle to distract from pregnancy rumors! She didn’t give birth to her daughter!

This year, speculation gained momentum. Mrs Middleton – now Catherine, Princess of Wales – has been keeping a low profile since Christmas. Kensington Palace said she was recovering from “a planned abdominal operation” and was unlikely to resume 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 dead, and 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 host of other celebrities and public figures — from President Biden to Elon Musk — who numerous online detectives have declared in recent months to be clones, body doubles, AI-generated avatars or otherwise not the living . They are breathing people.

For many people pushing the untruths, it’s harmless fun: casual gumshoeing that takes just a few clicks, a meme generator’s delight. Others, however, spend “countless hoursduring the chase, following other skeptics down rabbit holes and demanding that celebrities provide proof of life.

Whatever the motivation, what lingers is the urge to question reality, disinformation experts say. Despite extensive and irrefutable evidence to the contrary, that same sense of suspicion has recently infected conversations about elections, race, health care and climate.

Much of the Internet now disagrees on basic facts, a phenomenon exacerbated by the intensification of political polarization, distrust of institutions such as the news and academia, and by the rise of artificial intelligence and other technologies that can distort people’s perception of the truth.

In such an environment, celebrity conspiracy theories became a way to gain control over “a very precarious, frightening and disturbing moment,” says 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 even the lighter formulations of speculation,” she said. “It just speaks to a sense of unease in the world.”

Pop culture history is riddled with post-mortem claims that famous dead people (like Elvis and… Tupac) still alive. Now comes the opposite.

In recent weeks, frenzied online chatter claimed that Catherine was dead or even in a medically induced coma – a rumor dismissed as “ridiculous” by the palace. Internet sleuths stated that photos of Catherine in cars with her mother and husband were actually another woman missing the princess’ facial spots.

Last week, the palace sparked more suspicions with a Mother’s Day image of the royal family with its three children. Inconsistencies in the portrait’s clothing and background led to rumors that the image had been lifted from old photographs in an attempt to conceal her true whereabouts. By the time Catherine apologized for editing the image, the hashtag #WhereIsKateMiddleton spread on social media.

Another video about Catherine and her husband in a shop in recent days was scoured by conspiracy theorists who said she looked too blurry, too healthy, too thin, too flat-haired and 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 circulating, social media users interpreted the footage as a sign that the princess or King Charles III, who has cancer, had died. The video turned out of a building in Istanbul in 2022after Queen Elizabeth II died.

Recycled footage, easy-to-create computer-generated images, a general reluctance among most audiences to fact-check easily debunked claims and even foreign disinformation efforts can help fuel doubt about the existence or independence of celebrities. There are rumors that Mr. Biden is played by several masked actors, including Jim Carrey. Mr Musk is one of them maximum 30 clonessays rapper Kanye West (himself often said to be a clone). Last year, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin was confronted during a streamed press conference an AI-generated version of itself asking about his rumored body doubling.

A glimpse into the lives of celebrities was once carefully curated and rationed through a limited number of media outlets, says Moya Luckett, a media historian at New York University. Few public figures faced the kind of backlash that Paul McCartney faced in 1969, when a rumor spread that the Beatle had died years earlier and been replaced by a lookalike. The supposed evidence – winking lyrics and secret messages in reverse numbers on Beatles songs – so captivated the audience that Mr. McCartney stayed on. multiple interviews and photo shoots to prove his presence on the mortal coil.

Nowadays, celebrity content is available everywhere and all the time. Public involvement is a crucial (and often requested) part of the publicity apparatus; privacy is not. Reality is retouched and put through filters, making some public figures appear ageless and raising unreasonable suspicions about those who don’t.

When fans believe a famous person is in need, solving the case is treated as a community activity that comes from “a sense of entitlement under the guise of concern,” said Dr. Luckett. She calls the practice “care trolling.”

“It’s about wanting to control how this person responds to me, about wanting to be part of their story: I’ve already exhausted all the information available, and now I need more,” she said, noting that a similar impulse the current obsession with true crime stories. “I don’t think it’s necessary for you to want to save or help.”

Britney Spears, fresh out of a restrictive conservatorship, shared a series of unfiltered and often eccentric messages last year that some fans read as evidence she had been replaced by a stand-in.

So-called Britney Truths analyzed what they perceived as discrepancies in Ms. Spears’ tattoos, the gaps in her teeth and the color of her eyes. On one forum, a thread appeared entitled “She’s Been Cloned!” generated almost 400 responses. A popular hashtag distorted one from Ms. Spears best-known texts in #itsbritneyglitch, which appeared alongside claims that a look-alike used an AI filter to impersonate the singer online.

Ms. Spears, who was filmed in Las Vegas this year, has repeatedly rejected untruths about her death or confrontation with death. “It sickens me that it’s even legal for people to make up stories that I almost died,” she says wrote on Instagram in February last year. A few months later, she posted (and then deleted): “I’m not dead people!!!” She was quoted by People in October with the words: “No more conspiracy, no more lies.”

Conspiracy theory peddlers aren’t necessarily believers: Some of the top voices behind voter fraud lies have admitted in court that their claims were false. Ed Katrak Spencer, a lecturer in digital cultures at Queen Mary University of London, said publicly trying to expose a fake celebrity can feel playful.

This month, a years-old conspiracy theory involving singer Avril Lavigne resurfaced an ironic podcast by comedian Joanne McNally, who called her first episode “What the Hell.” The claim – that Ms. Lavigne died and was supplanted by a lookalike – came from a Brazilian blog called “Avril Está Morta”, or “Avril Is Dead”, which noticed myself “how susceptible the world is to believing in things, however strange they may seem.” In 2017, more than 700 people signed an online petition calling on Ms. Lavigne and her doppelgänger to provide “proof of life.”

“Fans are vocal artists themselves; the web and especially TikTok are platforms for performance,” said Dr. Spencer. “It’s more about creating and distributing content, where it all exists as a kind of scene. It is mainly about the attention economy.”

Dr. Spencer, who contributed to academic articleAccording to rumors about Beyoncé, it was possible to debunk celebrity conspiracy theories. In 2020 a politician in Florida accused the singer of faking her black heritage “for fame” and said she was actually an Italian named Ann Marie Lastrassi who was allied with a deep conspiracy involving the Black Lives Matter movement.

Her followers, the BeyHive, adopted “Lastrassi” as a term of endearment and incorporated it into fan fiction and online tributes. Beyoncé herself has made claims that she and her husband, Jay-Z, are in a situation secret societysinging on “Formation” that “y’all hate that Illuminati mess.”

“It all comes back to the issue of authenticity and the crisis of confidence in people’s perception of authenticity,” said Dr. Spencer. “People constantly wonder what they see.”

For some, it felt like the oil executive blurted the quiet part out loud.

“We have to give up the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas,” said Amin Nasser, head of what is by far the world’s largest oil producer, Saudi Aramco.

The energy transition was “visibly failing”, he added, saying predictions about impending demand for oil and gas were plainly wrong. The room, full of fossil fuel industry representatives at a conference in Houston, greeted the statement with applause.

Mr Nasser’s comments addressed widely differing views on the role fossil fuels will play in the global economy in the coming decades. Burning fossil fuels is the main cause of climate change.

The oil industry claims that its products, namely oil and natural gas, will play a dominant role in the coming decades. And with that in mind, they invest in new developments, especially in the field of gas.

On the other hand, the International Energy Agency, considered one of the leading authorities in the field, predicts that oil and gas demand will peak by 2030, as sales of renewable energy and electric vehicles will grow exponentially, spurred through incentives and subsidies. Just a few months ago, at the largest annual climate summit, negotiators from almost every country in the world agreed to “shift away from fossil fuels.”

In an interview with the Times last year, Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA, said he thought people like Mr Nasser were not seeing the whole picture. “I have a friendly suggestion for oil executives: They only talk among themselves,” he said. “They need to talk to car manufacturers, to the heat pump industry, to the renewables industry, to investors, and see what they all think the future of energy looks like.”

However, Mr Nasser suggested in his speech in Texas this week that the IEA was the one who misread the markets by focusing too heavily on rich countries and ignoring the huge increase in energy demand expected in countries in Asia and Africa that have only just begun to grow. industrialize.

His response was essentially to ask whether the IEA thought oil and gas companies were throwing away their money by collectively investing trillions of dollars in increasing exploration, drilling and infrastructure. “It is unlikely that there will ever be a peak in oil and gas, let alone 2030,” Mr Nasser said at the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference. “It doesn’t seem like anyone is using the farm for that.”

Although they spoke less bluntly at the conference, the CEOs of Shell, Exxon Mobil and Brazil’s state oil company Petrobras echoed Mr. Nasser’s points. In an interview with the Times earlier this month, Petrobras CEO Jean Paul Prates said he sees Brazil’s oil production increasing in the coming decades.

Shell CEO Wael Sawan said his forecasts depend on fast-growing Asian markets. The same analysis supports last year’s forecasts by OPEC, the global oil cartel, about oil demand would not peak until 2045 at the earliest.

The White House sides with the IEA

“The head of Saudi Aramco said he thought the demand estimates from the IEA and others were wrong,” John Podesta, President Biden’s senior adviser on international climate policy, told reporters on Tuesday. “We don’t think so. We think there is a big demand for electrification.”

Even as electrification takes off in some sectors of the U.S. economy, U.S. exports of crude oil and liquefied natural gas reached record highs in 2023. Wind and solar energy currently provide less than 4 percent of the world’s energy. An even smaller percentage of vehicles produced are partly or fully electric.

Natural gas in particular has experienced enormous growth and is being included in the global energy trade on a larger scale than ever before. Fracking techniques have paved the way for the United States to become the world leader in gas production.

Traditional oil producers in the Persian Gulf – including Saudi Aramco – are also heavily involved in gas production, none more so than Qatar’s national oil and gas company, QatarEnergy. Their plans would allow them to overtake the United States’ production shortly after 2030. At a recent press conference, QatarEnergy CEO Saad al-Kaabi told reporters that “we still think there is a great future for gas in at least 50 years. ”

Even if oil demand starts to level off, companies will still need to make investments to avoid a decline in existing oil fields, says Patrick Pouyanné, CEO of TotalEnergies.

Without these investments, he argued, the energy markets that determine the prices people pay for a variety of basic needs would fluctuate wildly. Like the other oil executives, he did not see renewables and the electrification of transportation growing fast enough to replace existing demand for fossil fuels, let alone in countries with fast-growing populations and industries dependent on fossil fuels.

“The natural decline in oil fields is about 4 percent per year, so we will have to continue investing in oil and gas fields” to maintain current production levels, he said. “Otherwise the price will be high and people will be super angry.”

Frictions between Sports Illustrated’s owner and its operator have caused unrest at the venerable magazine in recent months. That dysfunction surfaced again on Thursday.

Employees were told at a meeting that the magazine would stop publishing its print edition after the May issue, said Steve Janisse, a spokesman for Manoj Bhargava, the businessman whose hand-picked leadership team effectively manages the publication. But that message flies in the face of what Sports Illustrated’s owner, Authentic Brands Group, has said about finding a way to ensure the magazine’s survival in print.

Authentic Brands, primarily a licensing company that acquires the rights to well-known brands, bought the publication in 2019 for brand recognition, but not with the intention of running a magazine. The Arena Group, a media company that publishes several news websites, subsequently reached an agreement to operate Sports Illustrated, under license from Authentic Brands.

Last year, Mr Bhargava, the founder of the 5-Hour Energy drinks company, agreed to buy a major stake in the Arena Group.

In January, Authentic Brands terminated its deal with Arena Group after Arena breached the licensing agreement failure to make a payment of $3.75 million. Shortly afterwards, much of the publication’s staff was told they would be laid off immediately or laid off within 90 days. Since then, Authentic Brands has been considering a deal with new licensees, which has led to the current uncertainty.

Sports Illustrated was once the crown jewel of sports journalism, and its weekly cover was some of the most coveted real estate in the industry. But the publication has been in decline for years – the magazine is now a monthly rather than a weekly – and the past few months have been particularly brutal.

In November, Sports Illustrated was embarrassed by a report that it had published product reviews under fake author names, apparently generated by artificial intelligence. The Arena Group blamed an external supplier.

President Biden is struggling to overcome doubts about his leadership within his own party and widespread dissatisfaction with the country’s direction, leaving him behind Donald J. Trump just as their election battle is about to begin, according to a new poll from The New York Times and Siena College.

With eight months to go until the November election, Biden’s 43 percent support lags behind Trump’s 48 percent in the national survey of registered voters.

Only one in four voters think the country is moving in the right direction. More than twice as many voters believe Mr. Biden’s policies have harmed them personally as believe his policies have helped them. A majority of voters believe the economy is in bad shape. And the share of voters who strongly disapprove of Biden’s handling of his job has reached 47 percent, higher than in the Times/Siena polls at any point during his presidency.

The poll offers a series of warning signs for the president about weaknesses within the Democratic coalition, including among women, black and Latino voters. So far, it is Mr. Trump who has better united his party, even amid an ongoing primary campaign.

Mr Biden has marched through the early candidate states with only nominal opposition. But the poll showed Democrats remain deeply divided over the prospect of 81-year-old President Biden leading the party again. About as many Democratic primary voters said Biden should not be the nominee in 2024 as he should be — with opposition strongest among voters under 45 years old.

Trump’s ability to consolidate the Republican base better than Biden and unite his own party’s base is evident in the current thinking of 2020 voters. Mr. Trump wins 97 percent of those who say they four voted for him years ago, and virtually none of his former supporters said they will vote for Mr. Biden. By contrast, Mr. Biden is winning only 83 percent of his voters in 2020, while 10 percent say he now supports Mr. Trump.

“It’s going to be a very difficult decision — I’m seriously considering not voting,” said Mamta Misra, 57, a Democrat and economics professor in Lafayette, La., who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020. will come out anyway. Things are going to be bad for the Democrats. I don’t know why they don’t think of someone else.”

Trump’s five-point lead in the survey, conducted in late February, is slightly wider than in the last Times/Siena national poll of registered voters in December. Among the likely electorate, Trump currently leads by four percentage points.

In last year’s survey, Mr. Trump led by two points among registered voters and Mr. Biden led by two points among the expected electorate.

One of the more ominous findings for Mr. Biden in the new poll is that the historic lead Democrats have had among working-class voters of color who have not gone to college continues to erode.

According to exit polls, Mr. Biden won 72 percent of those voters in 2020, giving him a nearly 50-point lead over Mr. Trump. Today, the Times/Siena poll showed Biden with only a narrow lead among non-white non-college voters: 47 percent to 41 percent.

The survey repeatedly shows a tension gap between the two parties, with just 23 percent of Democratic primary voters saying they were excited about Mr. Biden — half of Republicans who said they were about Mr. Trump. Significantly more Democrats said they were dissatisfied or angry because Biden was the leader of the party (32 percent) than Republicans who said the same about Trump (18 percent).

Both Mr Trump and Mr Biden are unpopular. Mr. Trump had a weak favorable rating of 44 percent; Biden did even worse, with 38 percent. Among the 19 percent of voters who said they disapproved of both likely nominees — an unusually large 2024 cohort that pollsters and political strategists sometimes call “double haters” — Mr. Biden actually led Mr. Trump, 45 percent to 33 percent.

The candidate who won over such ‘double haters’ won the elections in both 2016 and 2020.

But for now, dissatisfaction with the state of the country is clearly hurting Mr. Biden’s prospects. Two-thirds of the country believes the nation is heading in the wrong direction — and Trump is winning 63 percent of those voters.

The share of voters who believe the country is on the right track remains a bleak and small minority at 24 percent. Still, even that figure is a marked improvement from inflation’s peak days in the summer of 2022, when only 13 percent of voters thought the country was moving in the right direction.

“If we get another four years of Trump, we’re going to be a little bit better economically,” said Oscar Rivera, a 39-year-old independent voter who owns a roofing company in Rochester, NY.

Mr. Trump’s policies were generally viewed much more favorably by voters than those of Mr. Biden. Fully 40 percent of voters said Trump’s policies had helped them personally, compared to just 18 percent who said the same about Biden’s.

Only 12 percent of independent voters like Rivera said Biden’s policies had helped them personally, compared to 43 percent who said his policies had hurt them.

Mr. Rivera, a Puerto Rican, said he doesn’t like the way Mr. Trump talks about immigration and the southern border but plans to vote for him anyway. “Biden? I don’t know,” Mr. Rivera said. “It seems we are weak, America is weak. We need someone stronger.”

Overall, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump were dead, even among esteemed independent voters, at 42 percent each.

But time and time again, the Times/Siena poll revealed how Mr. Trump has carved into more traditional Democratic constituencies while maintaining his position among Republican groups. For example, the gender gap no longer benefits Democrats. Women, who strongly favored Biden four years ago, are now equally divided, while men gave Trump a nine-point lead. The poll showed Mr. Trump trailing Mr. Biden among Latinos, and Mr. Biden’s share of the black vote is also declining.

There are, of course, unpredictable

The poll found that 53 percent of voters currently believe Trump committed serious federal crimes, up from 58 percent in December. But looked at another way, Trump’s current lead over Biden has been built with a significant number of voters who believe he is a criminal.

The country, meanwhile, remains divided over some of its thorniest domestic and international issues.

By a narrow margin, more voters favor making it more difficult for migrants at the southern border to seek asylum (49 percent to 43 percent). Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden made dueling appearances at the border this week; Illegal border crossings reached a record high at the end of 2023.

As the conflict between Israel and Hamas rages in its fifth month, 40 percent of voters said they sympathized more with Israel, compared to 24 percent who said they sympathized more with the Palestinians. Mr. Trump won 70 percent of those who primarily supported Israel; Mr Biden won 68 percent of those who sided with the Palestinians, even as he faced demonstrations and a protest vote over his pro-Israel stance.

Philip Kalarickal, a 51-year-old anesthesiologist in Decatur, Georgia, is a Democrat who is dismayed by Mr. Biden’s handling of the humanitarian fallout from the conflict in Gaza.

“Joe Biden should do more to ensure that the Israeli government does this in a way that provides them with security but without the civilian toll,” said Dr. Kalarickal, adding that he would reluctantly support Mr. Biden this fall since he lives in a swing state.

“I understand that my voice or lack of voice has consequences, and I look at the alternative and it is worse than the current one,” said Dr. Kalarickal. “But I would like to express my dissatisfaction. The way I vote doesn’t mean I like it.”

The Biden campaign hopes that more and more voters like Mr. Kalarickal will return to their usual partisan patterns in the coming months. The return of such reluctant Democrats is one reason the Biden campaign has been optimistic that the polls will narrow and eventually reverse as the choice between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden becomes clearer.

Trump’s Republican rival Nikki Haley, who has argued he will lose in November, leads Biden by double the margin over the former president: a hypothetical 45 to 35 percent. But she has struggled to gain traction in the primaries and the poll predicts big losses on Super Tuesday next week, with 77 percent of Republican primary voters choosing Trump over her.

Alyce McFadden And Ruth Igielnik reporting contributed.

The New York Times/Siena College survey of 980 registered voters nationwide was conducted on cell and landline phones from February 25 to 28, 2024, using live interviewers. The margin of sampling error for the presidential vote choice question is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points among registered voters. Crosstabs and methodology are available here.