Kate Middleton, Britney Spears and the online trolls doubt their existence

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.”