LONDON — Social media accounts linked to a prominent Russian disinformation campaign were all too happy to capitalize on conspiracy theories about the whereabouts of Kate, Princess of Wales, according to an analysis by British security experts.
The role played by these shadowy Russian actors may serve as an alarming test case, experts said, in a year when elections in Washington and Europe will be buffeted by the long-standing fake news threat — which is now being supercharged by artificial intelligence.
However, clear as the malicious foreign involvement in the #KateGate conspiracy was, the researchers at the Security, Crime and Intelligence Innovation Institute at Cardiff University in Wales were quick to point out that these actors were not responsible for originating rumors and conspiracy theories surrounding the princess, before she revealed last week that she was being treated for cancer.
“It’s not as though these Russia-linked accounts were driving the story; they were jumping on it,” said Martin Innes, the institute’s director. “It was already being framed in conspiracy terms, so foreign actors don’t need to set that frame — that’s already there to exploit.”
Conjuring these theories was usually the work of Western influencers with high follower counts, regular social media users engaging with them. While some cracked jokes and posted memes, others took a more sinister tone as people speculated about Kate’s whereabouts. Traditional media played its own role in the feedback loop by amplifying and prolonging the circus.
But Innes and his colleagues said they identified 45 accounts posting about Kate on X that bore the hallmarks of the Russian disinformation campaign known as Doppelgänger. For the researchers who have spent years analyzing this sort of traffic, telltale signs included the accounts’ usernames and the fact that they had apparently been created in batches and were all using the same wording. Some were easy to mark out…
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