A Global Frenzy How Kate Mania Is Driven By Fake News

When The Sun published images of the Prince and Princess of Wales shopping at a farm shop at the weekend, it said it was doing so "in a bid to end weeks of online speculation which has seen wild conspiracy theories about Kate spread unchecked".

- Esther Addley, Dan Milmo, Andrew Roth

If that was the aim, it certainly has not worked.

"Do you believe this is Kate Middleton?" is the caption of one TikTok video about the pictures that has been viewed 3.5m times. "Not Kate. Nooo," reads one of the almost 2,000 comments. "I'm not even big on the royals and I knew it wasn't her," says someone else. Another video, titled "Where is #katemiddleton? Cause that's not here! [sic]", has 1.1m views.

Ten days after Kensington Palace released a photograph of Catherine with her children - which it later was forced to admit had been altered - the enormous scale of the conspiracies it has fed and generated is becoming apparent.

The Princess's whereabouts, and the more outlandish theories attached to that question, have been the subject of frenzied online speculation around the world, as illustrated by data seen by the Guardian. According to BrandMentions, a company that monitors the spread of hashtags and keywords online, over the past seven days the hashtags #whereiskate #katebodydouble and #katemiddleton have been used on social media accounts and webpages with a total reach of 400 million people worldwide, as measured by factors such as account followers.

The hashtags were mentioned 5,400 times, with Instagram accounting for more than eight out of 10 mentions, followed by Tik Tok which accounted for 5% of mentions. Posts with those hashtags have been shared 2.3m times and liked 2.2m times.