You Should Pay Attention to the Kate-spiracy, Actually

Trust is the invisible glue that keeps society chugging along but one can’t help but notice that here and there, it’s beginning to lose its stickiness. The rise of misinformation, propelled across social media networks, has been a polarising force for several years now. The prospect of increasingly realistic generative AI, however, (some of which can even handle hands now) means that, for the mere mortals among us who don’t quite have the time for pixel-by-pixel scrutiny, it’s getting ever more difficult to figure out if we should believe what we see and hear.

And oh, look! Here comes Kensington Palace,  sloshing gin and flicking still-lit fag ends in the middle of this brittle, desiccated media landscape, sucked dry of trust and primed for conspiracy. Welcome to Kategate.

If you’re as chronically online as I am, chances are you may have caught wind of delirious speculation and conspiracy theories that have sparked up around the Princess of Wales who hasn’t been seen publicly since Christmas Day because, according to the Palace, of some scheduled abdominal surgery. Or, rather, she hadn’t been seen until a stagey looking pap shot last week and a wholesome family photo of Kate and her three kids sent out yesterday for the UK’s Mother’s Day… a photo that was soon spiked by news wires and photography agencies like  Getty, Reuters and the Associated Press because of suspected photo tampering. 

Social media sleuths have been all over it, d'accord, picking out weird reflections, oddly rubbed out sleeves, and apparent blurs. 

It would, of course, be naive to believe that publicity shots are issued to the press without a little digital nipping, tucking and airbrushing. I’m not a crisis comms expert by any means but when the reason for the photo is to quell rumours and febrile fantasies, I would think the better strategy would be to not fling more fuel on the raging rumour wildfire.

What was probably a bit of DIY, AI-assisted image tweaking has, in the minds of the BBL truthers, become the second coming of the moon landing.

It’s all a load of nonsense, a distraction, superficial chit chat… but that’s exactly why the Kensington Palace PRs should have taken it seriously. In the UK, the collective online silliness is a national sport. There are no lengths to which people won’t go in order to avoid doing actual work. Take this column, for example. This is the nation that voted in Boaty McBoatface for Christ’s sake. Even renowned Republican Owen Jones is tweeting about something that would normally be the remit of the  House of Windsor super stans.

But I think there’s something more serious at play here - and, as susceptible as I am to self-delusion, I don’t think I’m saying that to justify the waste of my own mental resources on the topic. It’s this. As it gets easier and easier to fake and share misleading material, institutions, whether they be brands or hereditarily insular feudal hangovers have to make sure that they hold themselves to the highest standards with whatever they put out there. 

The Royal Family, lest we forget, is built upon a foundation of public trust and respect - we have to buy into the myth for it to survive - and between Prince Andrew’s links with Jeffrey Epstein, the death of Princess Diana and the remote possibility that the divine right of kings is not a thing, actually,  those foundations are looking positively rotten. 

Not only do they risk any trust the public holds in them slithering away, but every drip of mistruth contributes to an overall atmosphere of mutual mistrust.

Communications technology has been helping people push fake news and misinformation since the printing press… scratch that, since the invention of the written word… actually, scratch that, probably since cave people sat down to embellish their hunting tales on the walls of the caves of Lascaux. But even the most relaxed observer can’t deny that the speed and volume of misinformation are a tad more intense than in the Paleolithic era.

So, yeah, Kate-Gate is not a particularly edifying online wormhole to slide down, and one might prefer to avoid it altogether. After all, at its heart, it’s one woman who understandably wants to keep her private medical affairs private - probably. But it’s a real time case study in the erosion of public trust in our institutions and media - a trust that has taken a battering as it is over recent years - and a possible glimpse of what’s to come.