Kate Middleton: Russians behind conspiracy theories about her health – What experts reveal

Kate Middleton’s announcement that she has been diagnosed with cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy has sent shockwaves around the world and comes just days after the uproar over a teased photo the Princess of Wales posted on Mother’s Day sparked conspiracy theories about her health.

Martin Innes, a disinformation expert at Cardiff University in Wales, spoke to CNN and described the “shadowy” situation surrounding Kate’s health as an “ideal situation” if a “foreign agent” decided to get involved, and indeed as reported fila accounts practiced in the Kremlin took advantage of the situation.

The role played by these “shadowy” Russian actors could serve as a troubling test, experts said, in a year when elections in Washington and Europe will be affected by the long-standing threat of fake news, compounded by the Artificial Intelligence.

However, as clear as foreign involvement was, researchers at Cardiff University’s Institute for Security, Crime and Intelligence Innovation were quick to point out that these actors were not responsible for generating rumors and conspiracy theories surrounding Kate Middleton.

“It’s not that these Russia-linked accounts were driving the story, but they built on it and appeared,” said Innes, who is also the institute’s director. “It was already framed in terms of conspiracy, so foreign actors don’t need to set the frame, they were already there to exploit,” he added.

45 accounts are linked to the Kremlin

Innes and his research team discovered 45 social media accounts that posted false claims about the princess in a disinformation campaign linked to the Kremlin.

He accused Russia of repeating this tactic in the past, when it had peddled conspiracies about Russia’s war in Ukraine and French President Emmanuel Macron. The motivation for such campaigns, Innes said, is to “destabilize” Russia’s Western rivals and “undermine confidence” in their institutions.

A 2020 UK parliamentary report found “many signs of Russian interference” in its democratic processes, saying Russian influence had become “the new normal”.

Cardiff researchers have been running a major research program into disinformation since 2018, but began investigating the Kate Middleton conspiracies after seeing “unusual patterns in the traffic data” and “spikes that came out of nowhere”.

“The accounts did not make original posts themselves, but responded to posts about the Princess of Wales, inserting material about the war in Ukraine, defaming Ukraine, or celebrating the integrity of the Russian election,” Innes added.

The Doppelganger Team

The pattern of behavior was one the researchers recognized from a group of Russian actors they had previously studied. The group is referred to as the “Doppelganger,” a Kremlin-linked operation with targets in the United States and Europe, including Ukraine. This is a commercial company that has undertaken to conduct disinformation campaigns, the professor added.

“These are not groups belonging to the state security services, as has happened with other businesses,” said Ines. Instead, this campaign is run by “commercial companies that receive contracts from the Kremlin.”

In late 2022, Meta warned that Doppelganger was impersonating major news outlets and creating fake articles.

Meta said it had suspended the group, but its disinformation campaigns have since become more sophisticated. In late March, the US Treasury Department sanctioned two Russians and their companies believed to be part of Doppelganger, accusing them of operating “a sprawling network of more than 60 websites” that promotes disinformation on behalf of the Russian government.

Some conspiracies may be re-created. Earlier this month, the British Embassy in Moscow was forced to deny insensitive rumors about King Charles III that had begun to circulate wildly on Telegram and in the Russian media.

But often the group seeks to fuel stories that are already divisive. Rumors about Kate Middleton were particularly easy to target, Innes said, because much of the Western public was already in a conspiratorial “mindset”.

The objectives of the campaign

According to Ines, the goals of the campaign are twofold. First, to use the increase in traffic associated with Kate Middleton to spread pro-Russian content, often related to the war in Ukraine. Second, to sow discord.

“This is about destabilization. It’s about undermining trust in institutions: the government, the monarchy, the media – everything. These kinds of stories are ideal vehicles to do that,” he said.

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, told CNN that disinformation campaigns “always jump on topics that are attractive and divisive and that lend themselves to making people question credibility and credibility of the information they see’. But how effective the campaign might have been, he added, is another question: “Most people come across a lot of nonsense online anyway and are generally quite wary of it all.”

Anna George, who researches online disinformation at the Oxford Internet Institute, told CNN: “Russian disinformation campaigns like to sow confusion about who to trust,” noting that the carnage may have given the Kremlin a reason to accuse British institutions of spreading fake news.

14 billion views in one month

“All 45 accounts started with either A or B, like ‘Aardvark56,'” Inres said, which was “enough for us to be able to validate the claim that we know who’s behind it.”

The timing of Kate’s plots was also favorable to the Kremlin – as Putin secured a fifth term. The bots, Innes said, supplemented posts about Kate’s health with comments talking about the legitimacy of the Russian vote.

“For independent researchers, getting a good picture of TikTok is really difficult. But to give you a sense of the scale, we did a little research and the #KateGate story had 14 billion views in a month,” he added. These were total views and not just those linked to Russian accounts.

A plot that struck at the heart of the British establishment and came at a time that was beneficial for Russia created a “golden belt” for Kremlin-linked actors, Innes said.

“Typically, what they were trying to do was get their messages about the Russian election and Ukraine to the Western media. But the reason this was such a good story for them was because it allowed them to achieve their strategic objective … to destabilize the UK and its Western allies,” he stressed.

Russia denies any involvement

However, the Russian ambassador to the UK, Andrei Kelin, in an interview with LBC, denied any Russian involvement in spreading rumors about Kate Middleton’s health, dismissing the claims as “jokes”.

“This is very interesting. I have heard about it and was actually surprised. I’m afraid that probably the British media is never short of accusations against Russia,” he said characteristically.

👑 “Probably the British Media are short of accusations against Russia”

Russian Ambassador on allegations of fake Kate Middleton stories

Andrei Kelin says Russia allegations have been “very inventive recently”

“We wish Kate Middleton well”@LBCpic.twitter.com/3j2Ouv0fSf

— Henry Riley (@HenryRiley1) April 4, 2024

“It’s unfortunate because recently they’ve gotten very inventive with accusations, blaming us for it, which is ridiculous,” he added.

He added that the Russian embassy website wished Kate a full recovery.

In response to a request for comment from NBC News, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “We consider the Kremlin’s connection to this issue in any way absurd.”