Where is Kate Middleton? Conspiracy theories, institutions, and truth in the era of AI.

Published Mar 15, 2024, 9:24 PM

Where is Kate Middleton? https://www.vox.com/culture/24087565/princess-kate-middleton-disappearance-rumors-explained-abdominal-surgery-kensington-palace

The Kate Middleton photo scandal is a rare — and consequential — flub / A wave of wire services retracting a doctored image of the Princess of Wales and her kids set off a firestorm of conspiracy theories: https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/12/24098548/kate-middleton-royal-family-photoshop-manipulated-image

The edited Princess Kate photo probably wasn't made with AI: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/kate-middleton-photo-ai-image-photoshop-edit-rcna142799

Kate Middleton and the End of Shared Reality (paywalled): https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/kate-middleton-mothers-day-photo-fake/677718/

The Royal Family’s Kate Middleton Crisis Her disappearance isn’t just a tabloid sensation. It’s a sign of the monarchy’s deepening instability: https://www.thecut.com/article/where-is-kate-middleton-catherine-princess-of-wales-royal-family-crisis.html

Women Who Break the Glass Ceiling Get a “Paper Cut”: Gender, Fame, and Media Sentiment: https://academic.oup.com/socpro/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/socpro/spac020/6563163?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false

There Are No Girls on the Internet, as a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridgett and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.

Welcome to There Are No.

Girls on the Internet, where we explore the intersection of social media, technology and identity. And this episode is a special report. You know how back in the day they would do those like special report, special report. This is a special report on Kate Middleton. Mike, thank you for being here. Have you been following what is happening with Kate Middleton?

I wasn't at all, and then all of a sudden, I was like seeing it everywhere.

Uh yeah, what's what's going on?

Bridget So I feel the exact same way, like I'm not a Royals person, you know, It's not a cultural thing that I follow closely really at all. But I feel like I woke up last week and it's all An He's talking about. I was getting group texts about it, multiple text messages from multiple different friends about it, people that I hadn't talked to in years, like ex'es being like, hey, what do you think is going on here? So this is definitely one of those big cultural things that people who maybe just are casually, like the most casual followers of the royal family are now weighing into so fair warning. All of that is to say that I don't know a ton about the Royals, and so in this conversation, if I get something wrong or you're like, actually, she's a duchess, not a this like, I apologize in advance.

This is a little bit out of my out of my purview.

However, I do know a lot about conspiracy theories, particularly how they impact women and how they move online. This kind of feels like the perfect storm of what makes the conspiracy theory take off online. So naturally I want it to weigh in, So let's get into it.

Yeah, yeah, that sounds good.

So so like, what is the story here and why are we talking about it on this show?

So this whole thing really started with Kate back in January when Kensington Palace announced that Kate Middleton was going to be entering the hospital the day before for a planned abdominal surgery. The statement that they put out was like very clear that they were asking for a little bit of space on this. The statement read, the Princess of Wales appreciates the interest. This statement will generate. She hopes the public will understand her desire to maintain as much normalty for her children as possible, and her wish that her personal medical information remains private. The statement also said that Kate was not going to be appearing in public until Easter, which this year it's March thirty first, and she still really has not been seen, but other stuff sort of started to happen, like Prince William canceling a scheduled appearance to attend the funeral of King Constantine of the Helenus, who died last January and was his godfather. This led to intense speculation that something had happened with her, but Kensington Palace continued to say like, no, she's all good. Her recovery is still on track, even though she has not been seen. So again, to be clear, the statement that the palace put out said that she would not be seen in public until March thirty first. It's not March thirty first yet, so they haven't really like it's not like that data's come and gone, but people still have questions. So this is really where you have people really beginning to speculate. My group chat definitely like I don't know if y'all out there listening, if your friends have been talking about this NonStop, but mine have been talking about this NonStop. Here are just a few of the theories that I've seen floating out there about where Kate is. One, something bad happened with her surgery, something you know's she needs more recovery. Something bad has happened related to her hospital's day.

That's one.

Another is that she's been replaced with a body double. Another that I saw is that she is actually one of the performers from that Glasgow Ai Willy Wonka experience.

I mean, that would make some sense, right, Like with all the scrutiny on the royals, perhaps her deepest desire is just to be the unknown.

You before we got on the mic, you sent me that image that's like a screen, like a side by side of the Unknown and Kate. And what's funny to me about that image is that it's one of those images where I suspect they're trying to be like the similarities are there, but the Unknown wears a mask, so like.

No, they're not.

Could be anyone, could be anyone.

Although for those who listen to our round up about the Willy Wonka Ai fiasco. I found out some interesting information about the unknown.

Oh you know about the unknown.

I know about the unknown.

The unknown is a black woman, and I wrongly call I wrongly said, Oh, the unknown is like wearing a slash wig that wasn't a wig.

She just has full, beautiful black, curly hair.

The unknown becomes known.

If she If that actor is listening, you have a open invitation on the podcast.

We would love to have you, assuming that it isn't Kate Middleton, if.

It either way, honestly, either way. So I've heard a theory that Kate Middleton has actually been dead this whole time. And then there is my personal favorite theory that she's actually getting a BBL, a Brazilian butt lift. And if you've ever known anybody that's got that, you do have some like downtime where you're not seen in public while you recover.

That would be so funny if she came back and was like, no, I didn't get a BBL, and like, obviously did.

So that's the.

Thing about this speculation, right, some of it is like genuinely very funny and some of it is kind of dark.

In researching for this episode.

I went down quite a few Reddit rabbit holes with people speculating and giving their theories and their evidence. And I don't want to get too much into some of that because some of it, some of it is.

Like truly deeply dark. I will just say.

This, where is Kate to me kind of feels like Cubanon, but like for normal white ladies, right, Like, it's one of those things where a lot of the hallmarks of conspiracy theories where anything can be used as evidence that we're not being told the whole truth, right, And it's not just like a mundane truth that they're hiding. Like, the truth is not just that Kate is exhausted and wanted to break and you know who wouldn't if you were a royal.

It's like a sinister truth. It's not just a mundane truth.

And everything becomes a data point for the fact that they are obscuring this sinister truth via lies and obscuscation. So another truism about conspiracy theories that really helps them to spread that we're seeing here is that generally there is some nugget of truth to the theory that allows.

For like some specula of world building.

Right, Like, all of the conspiracy theories that I have really seen take hold have that where there's some nugget of something, where it's like, oh, this does seem to be evidence of something what unclear, But that is what allows people to really speculate and build a world on top of it. And the truth here is that there does seem to be something I guess I'll use the word uncharacteristic going on. Like I said, I don't really follow the Royals, but this is coming from Ellie Hall, who is a journalist she used to work for BuzzFeed, who really has been doing.

A lot of great coverage into the Royals.

She's been on There Are No Girls on the Internet and the podcast I did with cool Zone Media Internet hate Machine. Ellie Hall is the real deal, and she's been talking about how the pr strategy around this has been uncharacteristic from what we've seen from the Royals in the past. Charlie Worzel at The Atlantic Summariz is saying Kensington Palace's public relations strategy has been out of character. The communications team it doesn't usually respond to God. There's also been a dearth of speculative coverage from British tabloids, which Hall notes has aroused suspicions, and then of course there's the photo, which Hall wrote was distributed by the Palace in an unprecedented manner. So we'll get to the photo in a moment, but it does seem to be that people who have been following the way that the Royal Palace moves and how they put information out there and respond to information, are saying whatever they're doing.

Right now feels new and feels different, and it.

Sounds like a big point of contention is that if this surgery was like a planned surgery, like they say, why would Kate have also scheduled appearances that she would then need to cancel, right Like, if you knew you were getting surgery, why would you schedule an event and then need to cancel it. Concurrently, the Palace announced that King Charles would also be stepping away from the public eye to get treatment for an enlarged prostate, which many people think is kind of suspicious to have two of the most public facing royals both planning a medical procedure and an absence from the public eye at the same time. Royal expert and historian doctor Tessa Dunlop told The Mirror that it is unusual for the royals to talk about their health in this way that Charles has, where like you are saying like a specific medical or health need that you.

Are stepping away to get to get treatment for.

And then when you compare that to how they've talked about it with Kate, where they're just like, oh, it's an abdominal issue. All we can say is that it's not cancerous. It seems like to onlookers that that might be indicative of like not being told the full story. There was also this idea that Kate, for lack of a better phrase, has kind of been framed as like the reliable royal. Like when you're a royal, they want you to be in public all the time. All your moves are like scrutinized and picked apart, but they want you to like show up consistently and like look perfect and polished and polite while doing this these public appearances in which you will be like picked apart regardless of how you show up. And so historically it does sound like Kate for years has had this perception of like going along with that and kind of playing the game. So now people are saying that for her to be pulling back if that is indeed what this is seems uncharacteristic to the point that people feel like there has to be more to this story. So all of this is really a hallmark of how conspiracy theories move online, right the fact that there does seem to be a small nugget of truth that something at least uncharacteristic is happening here, and this lack of information that just leaves a lot of space for everybody to fill in the blanks and assume that something fishy or you know, malevolent is going on.

The royal family.

Has been pretty quiet while all this speculation has been swirling. I think Prince William put out some kind of a comment that he was like, oh, well, I'm not focused on what's happening on social media. I'm focused on my work, and you know, I get that response.

Like for a long.

Time, people, I think the media guidance was like, oh, you don't you shouldn't respond to rumors, you shouldn't respond to speculation, don't respond, be above it, ignore it. But it's clear to me that that strategy is just not serving them here because it just just leaves space for people to fill in that gap with whatever information supported by evidence. Or not, because they're not really saying anything to dispute it.

Yeah, it's interesting.

Earlier you described it as world building, which when I think of world building, I think of like games like Dungeons and Dragons or you know, any number of games where people are using their imagination for fun to create worlds. But with this, Yeah, it really seems like people are using their imagination to build worlds about public figures.

Right.

It's interesting, and you have to wonder, like, why why are people so invested in world building around this?

Oh?

I don't have to wonder because it's fun, Like I guess. That's one of the things that I really want to drive home is that one of the reasons why conspiracy theories can really take off is because world building is fun. People play games like that because they are fun. Should you be doing it and speculating about the lives and private health information about strangers?

I would argue no.

But the reason why people get so invested is because puzzles and games and feeling like you have figured something out.

That other people haven't figured out, scrutiny, you know, feeling like.

You were the clever person that was able to read between the lines, and like spot carefully constructed media or pr lies four lies and like really get the truth. That's fun for us, and it's very like validating. It makes it like if you are somebody who can cracks what's really going on, that's very self flattering because that makes you smart, that makes you clever, that makes you not a sheep, that makes you not somebody who dislike mindlessly accepts the party line that you've been given. All things that people like to feel about themselves. And so in all the times that I've covered conspiracy theories, which has been a lot on this podcast, that is something that I really kind of understand about them, how people can get sucked into them for many reasons, not the least of which is because it's entertaining. But I think that, as you said, like there's a difference between world building, speculative world building for a D and D character that you spent all this time building up, and a real person who is a stranger to you, who really exists and might very well really be going through something.

And so the.

Silence from the Royals really allows for all of this to build up, right, and it really fuels more theories that like something fishy is going on, not just not just like mundane something like bad is we're not being told something bad. One person on Twitter said, quote, you're telling me that Kate Middleton, the same woman who posed outside the hospital like a freaking supermodel mere hours that they're giving birth, suddenly requires months of recovery before showing her face and the British press now magically respects privacy. This feels sinister, So listen, As I said, I don't follow the royals that closely, so I won't even pretend to act like I have some insight into what's going on here. As somebody who has really studied conspiracy theories and the way they move online.

I bet the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

That maybe something is going on that the royal family is not being one hundred percent honest about, and maybe that thing is a lot more mundane than a lot of the onlookers would like to believe, and are sort of like building up in their head, and it's possible that the motivations for that aren't necessarily like sinister, let's take a quick break.

At our back.

It does feel a little bit like there is something going on, because like stories like this, they could so easily kill it if there was nothing happening, you know, if everything was above boards, they could easily kill the story by releasing a photo of her looking happy and healthy.

Right, well, let's talk about that, because this is actually where stuff gets real weird. So there has been one photo of Kate since January that was published on March fourth. It's that photo where she's in the car with her mom. It's kind of grainy. The other picture that was published was on her Instagram of her and her kids for Mother's Day, which in the UK is March tenth. This photo was pretty obviously manipulated in some way. Now, the individual edits on the photo are pretty minor individually, but like on their own, taken together in totality, like it's not a good look. And the fact that the edits are like really amateurish. You know, when you look at the picture, it's obvious that something is not right with this photo. And so I think that's why when they put this photo out there was a complete uproar because after all of this speculation that where is Kate? Is she okay? YadA, YadA YadA. The way that you respond to that is this image that clearly does not look right. Of course, that's going to be red meat to all these people speculating that something has gone wrong. So a lot of people were speculating that those images were AI generated, or even that they were AI generated deep things, like the image did not exist in any capacity, Like it wasn't just an.

Edited image, that image never took place.

People were even saying that the image was an edited version of a picture of Kate from the cover of Vogue. Now this conspiracy theory, to me felt especially stupid because you had people who were like doing side by side comparisons of the manipulated image that Kate put out and the image from the Vogue magazine and being like, look how they look so similar. That her smiles the same, her eyes are the same. It's the same person. So yeah, they do look similar, Like a picture of the same woman might look the same, Right.

Makes sense if she really is the same woman.

How deep does this thing go?

So despite all of the speculation that these photos are like AI generated deep fakes, NBC spoke to Hanny for Reid, a University of California Berkeley professor who investigates digital manipulation and misinformation, who.

Basically said it doesn't look like AI to me.

It looks like somebody just used good old fashioned photoshop to edit those photos and that they are not AI generated deep fakes. Hanny says, I think it is unlikely that this is anything more than a relatively minor photo manipulation. There is no evidence that this image is entirely AI generated, So AI or not, the photo had been manipulated so much that it became a violation of most newswire services policies. So if you don't know what a newswire is, organizations and institutions like Kensington Palace or the United Nations or NASA, they submit photos to newswire services, and those services basically vet and fact check those photos and then send them all around for other media outlets to use. Now, anybody who is submitting a photo to a newswire service knows.

The drill right.

There are very clear and specific rules about how the photos can be edited, like, for instance, when it comes to the Associated Press, you cannot even remove red eye from those photos. This is why if you ever want to get you know, if you ever see pictures on Instagram of like an event or an award ceremony and all the celebrities look perfect and polished. If you go to Getty or go to ap you can get the real, unedited photo. And that's how I know that when you're scrolling social media and you're thinking, like, oh my god, celebrities, they look so perfect. None of those photos are real. They are putting the edited photo on their Instagram.

If you do a.

Side by side of any of those photos, they all tell a very different story. And that is why nobody took compare themselves to what they are seeing on a celebrities Instagram.

Yeah, it starts to get into like interesting existential questions though, like if the you know, if a celebrities photo from like an award show has been touched up to like remove the red eye and smooth over their pores, is it a fake photo?

I mean, like in twenty twenty four, what even is a photo?

Like, I mean, I don't want to get I don't want to make it seem like I just did a massive bong rip before before recording this episode. But like, you know, I know people who have entirely AI generated headshots on their LinkedIn of images that don't.

Exist, but like yet there they are.

So I do think we're all sort of grappling with some larger existential questions about what is a photo, what is truth, what is reality? And I think that this whole Kate Middleton thing really demonstrates that were in this kind of new and precarious territory when it comes to that. So one place where this is not precarious is newswire services because the associated press, Getty Images, and Reuters all issued kill notices for this photo, which means that they were advising news agencies to remove this photo from their archives and from circulation and to not use it at all. I cannot stress to y'all how big of a deal this is. In my entire time working at MSNBC, not once did I ever see one kill notice.

That is how rare it was.

The Verge reports that quote kill notices are incredibly rare and unusual. One wire service source told me they could count on one hand the number of kills issued in a year. To give you a sense of scale, AP says it publishes thousands of stories a day and a million pictures a year. Getty Images covers one hundred and sixty thousand events annually. That a kill notice of this magnitude happened is a big deal.

Okay, so that's a pretty big screw up on somebody's part.

How did this happen?

Well, Kate says that she was just like innocently playing with photoshop, like we all do. She put out a statement that said, like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother's Day.

Signed. See what do you think of that statement? You seem like you have thoughts.

Yeah, it's I can feel the like tendency to want to speculate and world build like happening within me in real time here, Because like my initial reaction to that is, why is Kate Middleton taking her own photos and editing her own photos and managing her own social feed?

Like?

Is that how it works? I would assume that she would have staff to do that.

It's so funny because I had the same exact feeling when I read this statement one two, I kind of almost again and this is me like projecting my own whatever onto it. I almost kind of like felt this statement was sort of like like the I hope everybody's celebrating had a very happy Mother's Day. It kind of seems like, worry about your own family, don't worry about what I'm doing, you know what I mean.

Yeah, it feels like a little bit of a dodge. And it also, yeah, it feels like a dodge. It doesn't feel like it's addressing the actual like substance of the concern here.

That's exactly how I felt.

So, as you've said, unsurprisingly, this photo, which I feel like was obviously meant to show that Kate is like alive and doing well, did not accomplish that. In fact, just the opposite. So now you have people who really think that something is up, and the speculation has just been kicked into complete hyper overdrive. I gotta say, in my opinion, this was just a terrible com n PR move, Like I don't know if Kate did innocently edit this photo and post it, or if somebody else edited it and posted it on her behalf or whatever happened, but this is like a textbook conspiracy theory thing that drives people to speculate even more, Like I can't even it would be like, you know, the conspiracy theory that.

Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer.

It would be like if Ted Cruz went out on stage and was wearing like and I just and had just gotten a Zodiac tattoo or something, and it's like that that is the level of overdrive that this obviously would kick this conspiracy theory up into.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, I mean it feels like if there's conspiracy theorizing happening, releasing a ambiguously doctored photo would be exactly the thing to do if you wanted to feed the conspiracies.

Yes, so, I know the royals have had a pretty complex relationship with the media, but this image has become a.

Real sticking point.

Kensington Palace is no longer being seen as like a trusted source, and part of me feels like that, like is that really so bad?

But the fact that.

They are putting it in explicit terms like that, I think is a big change. Phil Setwind, Global News, director of Ajon's France Press, told BBC's The Media Show quote, all the agencies validated the photo, which clearly violated our rules because it's actually not even well photoshopped. When asked if Kensington Palace can maintain its reputation as a trusted source after this whole controversy, he said, absolutely not. Like with anything, when you're let down by a source, the bar is raised, and we've got major issues internally as to how we validate the photo.

We shouldn't have done it.

It violated our guidelines, and therefore we sent out notes to all of our team at the moment to be absolutely super more vigilant about the content coming across our desks, even from what we would call trust sources. He goes on to say something that I think speaks to your point about what even is a photo? What even is reality? He says, one thing that's really important is that you cannot be distorting reality for the public. The big issue here is one of trust and the lack of trust of the general public in institutions generally.

And in the media.

So it's extremely important that a photo does represent broadly the reality that it's in and therefore it is not in a sense telling some kind of a lie or some kind of a false truth around an event that happens. And so that really speaks to your question earlier of like, are what are these photos? In twenty twenty four, when AI and photoshop and all of these ways that images and reality can be manipulated. What does it even mean to demonstrate reality? Like, I think this guy is right, that it is really important that everybody understands and has that trust that what you're seeing is broadly true, broadly based in reality. But you and if you don't have that, it further erodes the trust in both institutions and news media. But like, there does seem to be some questions about what that means when the fabric of reality is so easily and often manipulated using technology.

And I don't have the answer to that. What do you think?

Yeah, I think it's uh. I mean sign of the Times is like a you know, kind of a cliche, But I feel like we're living in a time that's really characterized by lack of trust in institutions, and not just lack of trust, but like rapidly declining trust in institutions, as well as rapidly declining trust in what we even see, like the images we see on the news and social media. Like the idea of a shared reality itself I think feels pretty tenuous these days. And I guess this story kind of feels like Kate Middleton and the royals perhaps like stepped right into that. And you know what, maybe ten years ago might have been like a minor story about like royal gossip is now solidly in like the center of this existential information crisis that we're all having about like what what is reality?

Even? How do how can we know what is a photo? What is anything?

Exactly?

And I think I don't know that they realized that they were waiting into this, into all of these questions by releasing this photo, But I think I think that you're right that they really have and I think that this is some sort of a milestone where it's.

Like, no, we really do need to have an.

Understanding of what reality is. You can't just use technology manipulation to shape reality.

We will not accept that. We will not tolerate that.

Like John Alsop from the Columbia Journalism Review actually wrote a piece where he says that he thinks that this whole debacle is kind of a hopeful sign for our current media climate. He writes, Yes, much of the discourse around this episode has been untethered from reality, but much of it is actually applied do skepticism to a piece of information that merited it more skepticism, indeed, than credulous recent statements from traditional commenters about the royal family moving into a new golden age of transparency. Declining trust and institutions is undoubtedly a problem of our current information age, but institutions don't automatically deserve trust either. So I think that you're right that we're sort of grappling with what all of this means. But the fact that the wire services pulled it immediately, that the Royal family had to come out and say, oh, we edited this picture. It's been manipulated, I think does in some ways kind of speak to the idea that we're kind of asking and answering those questions in real time. But the answer is not, just like, you will accept the reality that we present to you without question.

And maybe that's a good thing.

Maybe it is.

Maybe that's the the optimistic take. I mean, I I hope that news agencies and the public and you know, you and me as well as individuals like all of us bring this same skepticism to other stories of you know, that have dubious evidence, right, Like it's it is interesting that there is this whole you know, media brew haha about Kate Middleton, you know where is she?

Honestly is it?

Like an American who doesn't follow the Royals, it just doesn't feel that important. Like I can see how it is important, and I you know, read an article a little bit ago written by a Britain about like the importance of the Royals as like a source of stability when they're government is feeling very unstable, and so like that kind of like made some sense to me, but like in general, it doesn't feel that important, and it feels like there are so many other like hugely important media stories where there.

Is a lot of.

Fake evidence, fake photos, fake narratives, like you know, the war in Gaza, the war in Ukraine. The Dysantis campaign released some deep fakes, but you know, back in the primary when they were still a thing, the like fake robo call that used a deep fake of Biden's voice, all of those stories got so much less airtime than this. And you know, I guess, optimistically, maybe this big story that's like using the sort of cultural hook of the Royals to get people thinking and talking about these things, maybe that will kick off kind of a new era of skepticism.

I hope you're right, and I feel very strongly that it doesn't matter if it's a like quote small story or like a cultural story or whatever, or if it's something as big as you know, a ongoing war or conflict.

I think that I've said this on the show before.

I'm sure people are sick of me saying it, but like, the truth isn't important. The truth matters, and we all deserve the truth, and so it doesn't matter if it's like a pop culture story that seems quite small or a big story. In fact, in my mind, those things are connected, right, And so I agree with you that maybe this is an indicative of like how we will be thinking about other quote bigger stories of medium manipulation and how we understand them through this quote smaller story, you know. Remac molavi Vesi, a digital rights lawyer and senior researcher at the Mozilla Foundation, told CBS something along these lines that I really agreed with. Quote it shows our vulnerability toward content and toward how we make up our realities. If we cannot trust what we see, this.

Is really bad.

Not only do we have already a decrease in trust in institutions, we have a decrease in trust and media. We have a decrease in trust even for big tech and for politicians. So this part is really bad for democracies and can be destabilizing. And so I kind of agree that it doesn't matter if we're talking about, you know, a campaign or a war or a pop culture event that if you if you don't have, if people no longer, if trust is no longer a thing that just exists, the entire thing breaks down, and the entire thing is destabilizing, and democracies are really fragile, and so like, I think it really does matter.

More.

After a quick break, let's get right back into it.

Absolutely, yeah, I totally agree, And I think you know, you talked about earlier on the show that when there's a lack of good, reliable information, people like to world build and it's fun to speculate about what might be going on, and that is harmful. But then what's even more harmful is when nefarious, bad actors with an agenda step into that space and world build in a way that is not just you know, fun speculation, but intentionally trying to like mislead and push authoritarian narratives exactly.

And this is where I'm kind of like having my own come to Jesus moment. Like everything I'm about to say, I'm saying in a mirror essentially to myself, which is that I am someone who loves pop culture.

Loves celebrity gossip.

I read de Mois like I enjoy that as a pastime. But I do not think that is wholly unconnected from the bad actors who are using that very same dynamic to manipulate people and destabilize democracies. And so I don't have the answer of where one ends and the other begins, but I think we got to ask those questions. And then I think, so you have all these questions about what is truth and manipulation, but when you add in the Royals, it just takes on another layer.

You know.

I read that piece and the cut that you referenced earlier about how the royal family kind of needs this magic to exist as an institution, like a stable institution, to survive, And I think that what we are seeing right now is that people have really lost trust in the Royals as an institution and the people who make media and cover the Royals and media more broadly. And so I think folks saw how Megan Markle was treated before her and Harry left their royal duties, Prince Andrew's crimes, that whole thing, and I think general questions about the place of a monarchy as this whole over of harmful colonial legacies has really got people asking some questions about, you know, the royals and how they exist so that magic that they're that they the cut piece describes that the Royal family kind of needs to be working for us all to believe in the institution as something that is stable and good. Kind of like, isn't it really work? That magic is really kind of not magicing so much.

Yeah, And you know, the other piece of that article in the Cut was not just how the Royal family needs the magic to exist, but also how the like British people kind of need them to exist.

And I found that interesting.

You know, again, as an American, it's not something that really resonates with me, but you know, it's it's been a long time since I read anything that was sort of celebrating the idea of a constitutional monarchy. It always just seemed like a weird colonial relic to me. But it was interesting to read in this modern era that we're in, when you know, survey after survey shows that people are open to other forms of government than democracy, which is like very alarming and concerning. But it feels like that is a little bit related here as well.

And this thing with the whole Kate Middleton image, I think to me really reads like the last gap of really trying to use technology like photoshop to create this reality where people can see the magic, have trust in it and believe that it exists, right, and then have it translated back into trust in that institution and that as a like governing body.

Does that make sense?

It does make sense in a weird way.

And so, you know, I think a lot of the tools that the royals and other famous people have to keep this machine sort of going, you know, pretty photos, a careful relationship with the media and the public, I think those tools are beginning to break down and become less effective in twenty twenty four, in part because we have the Internet. Right, people love to be slewed as a hyper focused on images to point out like what's not right with them. None of this is really new, like onlookers have been doing that with the royal family forever, but this new technology and internet fueled climate that is new. So I think these old tools will not work in this new climate. As Charlie Warzel puts it at the Atlantic, people have recently lost trust in both the Royal Family as an institution and in the organizations that cover the monarchy, in part due to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's departure from royal life. There is a new found sense of the Royals as conniving and manipulative, and the press plays into this. This trust vacuum when it collides with a still new technology such as generative AI, creates the optimal conditions for conspiracy theories to grow. It seems clear, at least in the case of the Royal family, that the institutions aren't sure how to handle any of this. It makes sense then that the two biggest is it real image controversies of the past year have centered on figures from archaic cultural political organizations, the papacy and the monarchy. He's referring to that AI image of the Pope wearing a popper poat, which I always say, like, completely fooled me, And it does make sense that, like, I think that you're right, that it reflects a larger disillusionment in these arcane political and cultural organizations.

Yeah, and also arcane political cultural organizations that have tended to be very conservative, right. And I think in the past, one of the ways they maintained power was by tightly controlling information. And with social media, that's suddenly so much harder, right, Like you maybe in the past you could talk to twenty news outlets and get them all on board.

That's not the case.

Now there's you know, hundreds of millions of people reposting stories all over the place. And yeah, then with generative AI and you know, lack of confidence in the veracity of photos, videos, audio. It's so it's a weird time for all of us. And yeah, it's not surprising that it's an especially weird, difficult time for these storied institutions that have developed most of their tools of power from a previous era. That feels increasingly it leaves them feeling increasingly ill equipped to deal with the current media environment that we're in.

Yeah, and I mean to that point, this is loosely related, but I feel like I'm sort of personally reckoning with wanting to read all the speculations about what's going on and also being like engaging in this feels icky a little bit like, like, engaging in speculating about somebody's health information feels really wrong to me, And so I think it speaks to how much we as the public feel like we are owed information about famous people, like the royals. Like on the one hand, you might be like, well, that's the drill when you become a royal, and maybe that's true, but I do think it speaks to like when what happens when people feel entitled to information, even sensitive health information about people they don't know, in a climate where information feels so tenuous, so easily manipulated. In my research for this episode, I did see like a level of entitlement around information and like ownership of people's public selves that I just did not think was healthy. And it is clearly gendered, like it is will link to a study, but it is very well documented that women public figures face greater criticism than male public figures, particularly around like health and well being. Like attitudes around health and well being are incredibly gendered. So it feels like a biased, unfair, not equitable conversation in general to be speculating on.

And I do think.

There's this like strange parasocial thing that happens with the Royals, like when I was doing research for this episode. This British tabloid journalist Liz Jones published this piece when Kate first left the public eye. The title is this feels personal. The news Kate is in the hospital has hit me like a young member of my family has been struck down. That is a wild piece to publish that. The fact that was the title of a piece is wild to me because she's not a member of your family. You don't even know this person. It is wild to publish a piece about how this is a personal drama for you, the health issues of someone that you have never even met.

And so I think that this is another thing that.

People are just starting to question, along with these archaic social and political, you know, rule parties. I think people are starting to ask questions about this level of parasocial scrutiny and is it healthy and is it something that we, you know, and by we I mean institutions media journalists should even.

Be contributing to.

And this is just my opinion as like a casual observer of all of this, is that, you know, I obviously thought that the scrutiny that Megan Markle faced was not Okay, it was really gendered and racist because she's a black woman.

And I think that you when you take her as this figure that people love.

To pick apart and beat up on in this really charged way, when you remove her from that conversation and all of that scrutiny is sort of being put on Kate, I think it becomes clear like just how much that scrutiny is, like how much that weighs?

You know?

Although I will say, in researching this episode, I did see a few pieces where they quote like sources close to Kate who basically blame Megan Markle for what's going on with Kate, or like, oh, all those horrible interviews that Megan mark will put out and Kate just has to wait to see when the next horrible Megan Markle interview will drop.

That would make anybody ill.

And so it's like, damn, even when Meghan Markle is not even in the mix anymore, you guys cannot help blaming her. You cannot help like keeping her name in your mouth even when she is not there.

My god, Yeah, well, I mean, like you said, it's gendered. It's just focused on the two women.

Exactly, like gendered and racialized because it obviously frames Meghan as like being to blame, not to mention that you have the same media figures who like would write these really nasty racist pieces about Meghan now saying oh, Kate deserves privacy and empathy, you know, the double standard becomes really obvious, and let's be clear, both of them deserve that same empathy and privacy. So just a side note is that my girl Sophie from Cool Zone Media and I were talking about this via text yesterday that she was like, isn't it funny how people are saying Megan Markell needs to speak up for Kate and what a bad take, Like, she sure doesn't. If she doesn't want to get involved in this and just wants to mind her business, she absolutely should. The idea that she should be like sticking up for anybody to me is wild and just like really confirm some of my thoughts about the how people feel owed to the labor and like public morality of black women sometimes even when they have done nothing to earn that. Uh So, yeah, all of this is to say, I do I think that we are really in an interesting space when it comes to both the royals, how we think about them, how we talk about them, how we think and talk about these these archaic ruling systems in general, and what all of that means in twenty twenty four in the context of things like generative AI, photo manipulation, and medium manipulation. More broadly, Like, I don't really have the answers, but it does seem like this feels like a line in the sand for the fact that people are really asking these questions and that the party line of you will accept the reality that we present to you and you will not question that is not working for any of us.

Yeah, it'll be real curious that, you know, a year or two from now to look back and see like, was this that kind of event that was you know, something of an inflection point about how we think about photos and evidence and news sources, And maybe it will you know, it's it's kind of an optimistic note to end on we we often it's often a lot of doom and gloom on this show. But yeah, maybe this is a sign of better things to come.

I'm hopeful about it.

And y'all, again, I am not the royal expert, so I want to hear from you. Maybe we'll do a follow up episode with your takes and your thoughts, so like, please reach out to us, you want to hear them, let me know what you think about all of this. Yeah, thanks for listening.

Yeah, Bridget, How can people let you know their thoughts and takes?

Oh?

You can find me on email at hello at tangoia dot com. You can find me on threads at Bridget Marie and I think my thread's name is the same as my Instagram handle. You can find me on blue Sky at Bridget Todd. You can try to find me on Twitter, although I'm not really there anymore.

Yeah, hit me up. I want to know your thoughts.

If you're looking for ways to support the show, check out our merch store at tangoti dot com slash store. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tegodi dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tengody dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by Me Bridget Toad. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative edited by Joey Pat Jonathan Strickland as our executive producer. Tarry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Almada is our contributing producer. I'm your host, bridget Toad. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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There Are No Girls on the Internet

Marginalized voices have always been at the forefront of the internet, yet our stories often go over 
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