Kate Middleton’s announcement that she is being treated for cancer should put a stop to the weeks of wild speculation about her whereabouts that preceded it. (Or, perhaps more likely, it won’t!) In any case, there remains plenty to unpack about the whole episode, including how it became the frenzy it did. Many of the same people who are now silently atoning were mere days ago scrutinizing video footage of the princess and declaring that they didn’t believe it was really her—and they were doing it openly, loudly, not in the dark recesses of some online conspiracy forum. How to explain this mass delusion? Has it all been a great concession to this kind of untethered-from-reality thinking? I posed these questions to Joseph Uscinski, a professor at the University of Miami and an expert on conspiracy theories. This conversation, which has been condensed and edited, took place prior to Middleton’s cancer announcement.
Slate: When did you sort of key into the Kate Middleton story as something people were conspiracy-theorizing about?
Joseph Uscinski: People are always conspiracy-theorizing about the royal family. In general, people are always conspiracy-theorizing about one thing or another. I wasn’t paying too much attention until journalists started covering it. And it’s sort of blown up from there. I think what’s going on now is that we’re paying attention to it because we’re paying attention to it. But it’s certainly nothing new, and it’s just an endless cycle of conspiracy theories that pop up and then go away. A pretty good example of that is that just as I’ve been getting a lot of calls that ask about “Kategate,” a month ago, I was getting a lot of calls about Taylor Swift conspiracy theories. You had the biggest singer in the world dating a player who’s playing in the biggest game in the world having something potentially to do with the biggest upcoming election in the world. So you put all that together, any of those stories is gonna be click gold because you’ve got audiences who like politics, pop music, and sports, all sort of swirling around together. This isn’t so different.
With Kate, there were people who might have really bought into the conspiracies, but there were also a lot of people just having fun with it. How can we know how many people actually believed what?
Well, until I go out and study it and maybe do some polling, I can’t give you anything more than conjecture. And the odds of me actually studying this are pretty low. Because of all the conspiracy theories out there, this probably ranks, at least for now, toward the bottom of things that concern me. With the whole Taylor Swift thing, Monmouth University did a poll shortly thereafter it became big. And for what had been called a far-right conspiracy theory, what wound up happening was that more Democrats had heard of it than Republicans. And the question is why, if it’s a far-right conspiracy theory? It’s because the mainstream media was reporting it so much to liberal audiences. So they knew about it. Now, Democrats weren’t believing it more than Republicans. But they had heard about it more. And this is sort of where we are right now with Kate Middleton. Now the theories are getting a lot of mainstream traction because they’re interesting to journalists and editors and they’re click-worthy. And it’s just gonna make more and more people aware of it. The exact number of people believe it? I could only guess. But I’m sure somebody will poll on it at some point, if not here then in the U.K.
Has this problem become worse lately?
Well, for a long time, the mainstream media has been warning us of conspiracy theories, and you can look back through headlines for the last 60 or so years. We’re always at the apex of conspiracy-theorizing. They’ve been saying it recently, they were saying 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 60 years ago: “We are in the golden age of conspiracy theories.” So I think this coverage probably gives the impression that tons and tons of people, vast majorities, are all taken by conspiracy theories, where that may not necessarily be true.
More broadly, the media has sort of struggled with how to cover this. Here it’s more of a tabloid story—it’s cultural and entertaining. In other instances, where it’s politicians doing it, it becomes a lot more difficult to navigate for journalists, because you have to cover these ideas if politicians are engaging in them and they’re having a political effect. So they can’t just ignore it. I remember in 2016, when Trump came out and said something to the effect of Ted Cruz’s dad had taken part in the Kennedy assassination in 1963. The Washington Post ran a pretty neat headline, it was something to the effect of, “How the hell are we supposed to cover this?” Because they really didn’t know. We were in new territory. But in these instances, as long as it’s clear from journalists that this might not be everyone believing it, that it might be a small number of people and then lots of people paying attention for entertainment value, I think that’s fine.
Usually there isn’t actual evidence of photo-doctoring. When that happened, it seemed like it sent people into overdrive.
But it’s not like “Oh, photoshopped picture, and now I jumped to a conspiracy theory.” Oftentimes, it’s “I’m a conspiracy-minded person. This plays into what I already believe about the world, so I’m gonna run with it.” Oftentimes it’s not information on its own that drives it. It’s people who are already inclined toward these sorts of ideas that then seek out information that blends with their worldview well. There have been people conspiracy-theorizing about the royals for a long, long time. There were conspiracy theories about how Diana was in hiding and still alive or that the queen had had her killed for some reason. It’s not new, and we have to keep in mind that everybody goofs something up. It shouldn’t be a shock that the royal family has gone through a lot of transition lately with the passing of Queen Elizabeth. And then King Charles is undergoing cancer treatment and Kate was dealing with her medical issues. Shockingly, they put out a wrong photo. The first question is: Does it mean anything? And the answer is probably not. There were a lot of explanations for a bad photo.
When the subsequent video was released, I noticed grumblings from people who didn’t think it was real, and that made me worry about how in the age of A.I., even video evidence isn’t going to be reliable.
This is what I’m actually working on right now. These same exact thoughts that you’re having about A.I. existed for every single communication technology that we’ve ever had: Every new communication technology is going to be a vector for misinformation. Everyone’s mind’s going to be warped or they just can’t believe anything. The worst rarely ever happens, and A.I. is not really going to present anything new. Photos have always been doctored, even going back 100 years. Look at the Cottingley Fairies if you want a nice British story to go with the story about the monarchy. Here you had somebody take a photo 100 some odd years ago of a girl in the woods, and they put fairies in a picture, and a lot of people believed that there were fairies living in the Cottingley Woods. This was a big thing. People held on to these beliefs for a long time. If you and I look at that photo now, we’d be really unimpressed. You can trick people with anything if they are already inclined towards being tricked.
Another good example is with Nancy Pelosi. A few years ago, they took a video of her. All they did was slow it down, and they said she was drunk. No fancy A.I., no image generation, just basic, basic video editing that a 10-year-old could do to slow it down, make it black and white, and now all of a sudden, “Oh, she’s obviously drunk.” Particularly with the A.I., there’s this feeling like, “Oh, we’re all gonna die” or “We’re gonna descend into a post-truth world,” which would be neat, because we were told eight years ago we had already descended into a post-truth world.
Still, I’ve been really surprised how many normal, smart people I saw seemingly earnestly engaging in some pretty wacky speculation.
I’ve been hearing those kinds of things for 15 years. “I can’t believe my cousin said this,” “I can’t believe my mother said that.” Welcome to this world. People believe all sorts of stuff. Unless you’re polling them or asking them all the time, we may not know. It’s not going to come up in conversation. But now you got something like this that becomes sort of salient, they’re gonna talk about it. You might be surprised. It was the same thing with vaccines. Vaccines were not the biggest thing on anyone’s mind in in 2019. But once the pandemic hits, now all of a sudden, every time you walk into a room, you think, “Are these people vaccinated? Who’s got COVID here?” Prior to that, no one gave a shit. I didn’t care what anyone’s vaccine views or behaviors were. If you were pro-vaccine, you might be finding out that a lot of your family was anti-vaccine. And you might say, “Oh, they’ve fallen down the rabbit hole, they just adopted these beliefs.” They may have had those beliefs a long time.
So you don’t think there will be a long-term impact from this?
The only one still talking about Taylor Swift is me. And only on phone calls to journalists asking about Kate. Look at all the coverage of that: gone right after the Super Bowl. Not a peep about it. It’s disappeared from salience. This at some point will go away. But who knows what the future is? Maybe it won’t. Maybe there’ll be some other events that happen with the royal family that sort of link to this in some way. But most of these just sort of float away.
We look at conspiracy theories and we tend to focus on the ones that are popular, that everyone knows about, but those aren’t representative of the whole. Most conspiracy theories are here and gone, shared at the watercooler, put on Twitter at 2 a.m., shared at family meal, and those will never take off. They’ll never have books written about them; they’ll never have journalists reporting on them. It’s just very few that seem to get any sort of traction, and even fewer that keep that traction for a long period of time.
