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Kate Middleton announcement that she is being treated for cancer should put an end to the weeks of wild speculation about his whereabouts that preceded it. (Or, perhaps more likely, she won’t!) In any case, there’s a lot left to unravel about the entire episode, including how she became the frenzy that she became. Many of the same people who are now quietly atoning were just a few days ago examining video footage of the princess and declaring that they didn’t believe it was really her, and they were doing it openly, out loud, not in the dark corners of some platforms. online. Conspiracy Forum. How to explain this massive deception? Has it all been a big concession to this type of thinking disconnected from reality? I asked these questions to Jose Uscinski, professor at the University of Miami and expert in conspiracy theories. This conversation, which has been condensed and edited, took place before Middleton’s cancer announcement.
Slate: When did you introduce the Kate Middleton story as something that people were theorizing conspiracy about?
José Uscinski: People are always theorizing conspiracies about the royal family. In general, people are always theorizing conspiracy about one thing or another. I didn’t pay much attention until reporters started covering it. And from there everything explodes. I think what’s happening 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 appearing and then disappearing. A good example of this is that just as I got a lot of calls asking about “Kategate,” a month ago I got a lot of calls about Taylor Swift conspiracy theories. You had the biggest singer in the world dating a player who is playing in the biggest game in the world and potentially has something to do with the next biggest election in the world. So if you put all that together, any of those stories are going to be a hit because you have audiences that like politics, pop music, and sports all spinning together. This is not so different.
With Kate, there were people who might have actually believed in the conspiracies, but there were also a lot of people who just had fun with them. How can we know how many people really believed what?
Well, until I go out and study it and maybe do some surveys, I can’t give you anything but guesses. And the chances of him actually studying this are pretty low. Because of all the conspiracy theories out there, this is probably, at least for now, among the things I’m worried about. With the whole Taylor Swift thing, Monmouth University did a survey shortly after it became big. And in the case of what had been called a far-right conspiracy theory, what ended up happening was that more Democrats had heard of it than Republicans. And the question is why, if this is a far-right conspiracy theory? It’s because the mainstream media reported it a lot to liberal audiences. So they knew it. Now, Democrats didn’t believe it any more than Republicans. But they had heard more about it. And this is where we now find ourselves with Kate Middleton. Now the theories are gaining a lot of popularity because they are interesting for journalists and editors and deserve a click. And this will make more and more people realize it. Do you believe the exact number of people? I could only guess. But I’m sure someone will do a poll on it at some point, if not here in the UK.
Has this problem gotten worse lately?
Well, for a long time, the mainstream media has been warning us about conspiracy theories, and you can look at the headlines for the last 60 years or so. We are always on the cusp of conspiracy theories. They’ve been saying it recently, they were saying it 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, for the most part, are convinced by conspiracy theories, which may not necessarily be true.
More broadly, the media has struggled with how to cover this. It’s more of a tabloid story here: it’s cultural and entertaining. In other cases, when it is politicians who do it, it becomes much more difficult for journalists, because these ideas have to be covered if politicians are involved in them and they are 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 that Ted Cruz’s father had participated in the Kennedy assassination in 1963. The Washington Post ran a pretty clear headline, it was something like, “How the hell? ” Are we supposed to cover this? Because they really didn’t know. We were in new territory. But in these cases, as long as journalists make it clear that not everyone may believe it, that it may be a small number of people and then a lot of people paying attention for the entertainment value, I think it’s fine.
Usually, there is no actual evidence of photo editing. When that happened, it seemed like people went into overdrive.
But it’s not like, “Oh, photoshopped photo, and now I’ve jumped into a conspiracy theory.” It is often said: “I am a conspiracy-minded person. “This plays into what I already believe about the world, so I’m going to follow it.” Often it is not information alone that drives it. It’s the people who already lean toward these types of ideas who then look for information that meshes well with their worldview. There have been people theorizing conspiracies about royalty for a long, long time. There were conspiracy theories about how Diana was in hiding and still alive or that the queen had her killed for some reason. It is not new and we must keep in mind that everyone makes a mistake. It should come as no surprise that the royal family has gone through a lot of transitions lately with the passing of Queen Elizabeth. And then King Charles is receiving cancer treatment and Kate was dealing with her medical problems. Surprisingly, they posted the wrong photo. The first question is: does it mean anything? And the answer is probably no. There were many explanations for a bad photo.
When the video below was released, I noticed complaints from people who didn’t believe it was real, and that made me worry about how, in the age of AI, even video evidence won’t be reliable.
This is what I’m really working on now. These exact same thoughts you have about AI have existed for every communication technology we’ve ever had: every new communication technology will be a vector of misinformation. Everyone’s mind will be warped or they simply won’t be able to believe anything. The worst rarely happens and the AI won’t really present anything new. Photographs have always been manipulated, even 100 years ago. Look at Cottingley Fairies if you want a nice British story to accompany the story about the monarchy. Here someone took a photo about 100 years ago of a girl in the woods, and they put fairies in a photo, and many people believed that there were fairies living in Cottingley Woods. This was something very important. People held these beliefs for a long time. If you and I looked at that photo now, we wouldn’t be very impressed. You can fool people with anything if they are already willing to be fooled.
Another good example is Nancy Pelosi. A few years ago they recorded a video of him. All they did was stop him and said she was drunk. No fancy AI, 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 AI, there’s a feeling like, “Oh, we’re all going to die,” or “We’re going to descend into a post-truth world,” which would be great, because eight years ago we were told that we had already descended into a post-truth world. .
Still, I have been very surprised by the number of normal, intelligent people I saw apparently seriously engaged in quite outlandish speculations.
I’ve been listening to that kind of stuff for 15 years. “I can’t believe my cousin said that,” “I can’t believe my mother said that.” Welcome to this world. People believe all kinds of things. Unless you are probing them or asking them all the time, we may not know. It’s not going to come up in conversation. But now that you have something like this becoming a thing, they’re going to talk about it. You would be surprised. The same thing happened with vaccines. Vaccines weren’t the most important thing on anyone’s mind in 2019. But once the pandemic hits, suddenly, every time you walk into a room, you’re thinking, “Are these people vaccinated? Who has COVID here? Before that, no one gave a shit. I didn’t care what anyone’s opinions or behaviors were about vaccines. If you were pro-vaccine, you might find that much 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 for a long time.
So you don’t think this will have a long-term impact?
The only one still talking about Taylor Swift is me. And only in phone calls to journalists asking about Kate. Look at all the coverage of that: She disappeared right after the Super Bowl. Not a word about it. She has faded from prominence. This will disappear at some point. But who knows what the future will be? Maybe not so. Maybe there will be other events that happen with the royal family that somehow tie into this. But most of these just float away.
We look at conspiracy theories and tend to focus on the ones that are popular, that everyone knows about, but that are not representative of the whole. Most conspiracy theories are here and there, shared at the water cooler, posted on Twitter at 2am, shared at a family meal, and never get off the ground. Books will never be written about them; They will never have journalists reporting on them. Very few seem to get any kind of traction, and even fewer maintain that traction for a long period of time. time.