When did it become normal for celebrity conspiracy theories to infiltrate the news cycle? The events of 2024 have a lot to answer for.<\/p>[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”credit-name” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font=”Black Han Sans|||on|||||” text_text_color=”#000000″ header_4_font=”|||on|||||” header_4_text_align=”center” text_orientation=”center” custom_margin=”||0px||false|false” global_colors_info=”{}”]
Words by Nikki Peach<\/strong><\/p>[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/flatplan-plus-content.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2024\/11\/imago778462215-scaled-e1732287983932.jpg” alt=”Jennifer Aniston” title_text=”Members of the Royal Family attend the Festival of Remembrance The Princess of Wales attends the Festival of Remembrance” force_fullwidth=”on” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][\/et_pb_image][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” sticky_enabled=”0″] We are living in a world \u2013 at least a digital world \u2013 where it is not uncommon to find conspiracies pervading the mainstream. Where social media chatter and hard news so often blur into one another, it\u2019s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction \u2013 at what point do we stop caring and read on anyway?<\/p>\n Perhaps there is something intriguing, possibly even comforting, about freely questioning our surroundings and indulging in our wildest assumptions \u2013 especially when it comes to celebrities. If 2024 has taught us anything, though, it\u2019s that it\u2019s a slippery slope. Where and how do we draw the line?<\/p>\n The start of the year was marred with theories about the Princess of Wales\u2019s whereabouts after she hadn\u2019t been seen in public for three months. A step back from royal duties to recover from \u2018planned abdominal surgery\u2019 wasn\u2019t a good enough explanation for the internet, and #KateGate quickly snowballed into something unprecedented in its scope.<\/p>\n #WhereIsKate, #KateGate and #KateBodyDouble quickly became viral trends around the world. Her absence dominated headlines as far afield as the Dominican Republic and Pakistan, with rumours encompassing everything from her \u2018impending divorce\u2019 from Prince William to a planned stint on The Masked Singer.<\/p>\n Then matters escalated when Kensington Palace shared a photoshopped picture of Kate and her three children on Mother\u2019s Day, which was later given a kill notice by all major press agencies. The following day, the Princess of Wales took to social media to explain the mishap. \u2018Like 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.\u2019<\/p>\n What was probably intended to put the fire out ended up fanning the flames. The following week, Kim Kardashian captioned a photo of herself posing in front of her car, \u2018On my way to go find Kate\u2019, and was duly roasted.<\/p>\n When William and Kate were spotted shopping together near their home in Windsor a few days later, they were accused of hiring a body double. Speculation reached such frenzied heights that a well-known Kate Middleton lookalike Heidi Agan, told The Mirror, \u2018My own social media has gone crazy as people think it is me, but I know it is not. I was at work at the time, so I know that is not me.\u2019<\/p>\n Of course, we know now that Kate was being treated for cancer and undergoing preventative chemotherapy. She delivered the news in a video, perhaps to quash further outlandish theories about her whereabouts, and deployed the same tactics to confirm she had finished treatment.<\/p>\n In hindsight, how did we allow things to get so out of hand? While conspiracy theories about the royal family have always existed, thanks to social media this one became a viral bloodsport. When the truth came out, no one was laughing.<\/p>[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”custom-quote” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” header_2_font=”Libre Bodoni|||on|||||” header_2_text_align=”center” header_2_text_color=”#333333″ header_2_font_size=”40px” header_2_line_height=”1.2em” global_colors_info=”{}”] Far from a one off, the #KateGate saga is likely a sign of things to come. After all, the king of fake news himself has just been re-elected as US president and his wife, Melania Trump, was at the centre of the second biggest body double conspiracy theory this year.<\/p>\n Noticeably absent from much of Donald Trump\u2019s campaign, many people literally did not believe Melania was by her husband\u2019s side at the polling station on election day \u2013 despite photographic evidence. Journalists were posting on X to say, \u2018Look, I\u2019ve never been a Melania truther, but this just\u2026 isn\u2019t her?\u2019 and another user wrote, \u2018That is fake Melania. Bone structure not even close.\u2019<\/p>\n These posts feed into a long-established conspiracy known as \u2018The Melania Trump replacement conspiracy theory\u2019, which started back in 2017 when Trump first became president. It denotes that the \u2018real\u2019 Melania is either dead or refuses to attend public events and is often represented by a lookalike. It gained so much traction at one point that Trump denounced the theory as \u2018fake news\u2019 himself.<\/p>\n As Kate\u2019s Mother\u2019s Day photo taught us \u2013 a picture paints a thousand words on the internet. After Trump won the election, he shared a photo of his \u2018First Family\u2019 on social media, where he stood next to his entire family as well as Elon Musk, but Melania was nowhere to be seen.<\/p>\n This gave rise to another bout of theories about Melania\u2019s whereabouts, her alleged \u2018post-nup\u2019 marital agreement and her reluctance to return to The White House. This is something that will no doubt intensify next year when Trump returns to office.<\/p>\n The truth is a lot of people indulge in these theories. Relish them in fact. We seem to experience schadenfreude in sharing memes with our friends, contributing our \u2018takes\u2019 on social media and reading lengthy Reddit threads posted by people with only numbers and symbols in their usernames.<\/p>\n Consider some of the most popular \u2013 albeit wholly unsubstantiated \u2013 celebrity conspiracy theories of the past decade. That Khloe Kardashian is OJ Simpson\u2019s biological daughter; Avril Lavigne died in 2003 and was replaced by a body double named Melissa Vandella; the murdered child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey secretly grew up to become Katy Perry; Katie Holmes was pregnant with a Scientology alien; Taylor Swift and Beyonce both have ties to the Illuminati, in fact Taylor Swift also has \u2018an evil twin\u2019 in Japan; and last but not least, Britney Spears is a secret government operative.<\/p>\n It’s like that many of us have heard of at least one of these theories, but they were never fed to us en masse in the way we\u2019ve seen happen this year. Far from being an unavoidable global story, these theories exist in their own little corner of the internet.<\/p>\n Until now, we have rarely all banded around the same theory at the same time. #KateGate and the \u2018Melania Replacement Theory\u2019 are examples of what can happen when we do.<\/p>\n \u2018The reason you had so many people who are not conspiratorial minded participating in [#KateGate] is because we are in a nadir of celebrity gossip and celebrity information,\u2019 offered journalist Anne Helen Peterson on her podcast, Culture Study. \u2018There are very few celebrities who feel like global or even national touchstones and so what was happening felt like something to talk about.\u2019<\/p>\n This rings true, but if that\u2019s all it takes for a conspiracy theory about global figure to go viral in this increasingly unhinged digital landscape then we should be wary.<\/p>\n When these theories start to infiltrate the zeitgeist, they quickly shift from niche and often harmless nonsense into something harmful and difficult to control.<\/p>\n Most of us like to believe that we can go down the rabbit hole knowing we will be able to find our way back out. If this year has taught us anything, it\u2019s that this is not necessarily true. While it\u2019s important to question our surroundings, we have a collective responsibility to monitor the extent to which we engage with conspiracy online. Let’s hope the events of 2024 are a cautionary tale.<\/p>[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider color=”#111111″ divider_position=”center” divider_weight=”2px” module_class=”custom-divider” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” custom_margin=”0px||0px||false|false” custom_padding=”0px||0px||false|false” global_colors_info=”{}”][\/et_pb_divider][et_pb_text module_class=”credit-texts” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font=”|||on|||||” text_orientation=”center” global_colors_info=”{}”] Photo: <\/b>IMAGO<\/p>[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Has #KateGate opened a can of worms when it comes to viral celebrity conspiracy theories?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":5231,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feature"],"acf":[],"modified_by":"guestgrazia","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5229"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5258,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5229\/revisions\/5258"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}#KateGate snowballed into something unprecedented in its scope<\/h2>[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]