Russia, United Kingdom | – The Kremlin’s hackers spread disinformation about Princess Kate

Princess Kate (42) has been diagnosed with stomach cancer. She confirmed this herself in an announcement on Instagram on Friday evening.

Middleton says that she has started preventive chemotherapy, and that she is in the initial phase of this. The wish of the British royal family was to cope with the cancer diagnosis in privacy. It didn’t turn out that way.

The information that Kate has cancer was pushed forward by conspiracy theories in social media, and especially in videos on TikTok. Everyone speculated where the princess had gone.

In the days before Middleton revealed her cancer diagnosis, all sorts of rumors swirled online about her health.

Now several security experts believe that this may have been the result of a coordinated smear campaign against Middleton and the British royal family. They claim that Russian hackers may be behind it and that the aim was to create discord in the UK.

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Appeals to the conspiracy theorists

Martin Innes is an expert on “digital disinfomation” (fake news and disinformation, editor’s note) at Cardiff University in Wales.

He and his colleagues have traced 45 social media accounts that posted false claims about Princess Kate to a Kremlin-linked propaganda network. The group has previously spread fake news about Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyj, and French support for Ukraine.

Innes explains that such groups exist to create political division and undermine trust in Western institutions – In this case, the British royal family and the news media.

– They try to appeal to the conspiracy theorists. By using their language, you can appeal to these people. As a result, people who support the royal family get angry, says Innes to the New York Times newspaper.

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This is how they spread lies

Social media coverage of Princess Kate has skyrocketed over the past three months. The lack of information about the princess’s health created a vacuum that Russian hackers can fill with rumors and speculation, Innes explains.

In the example below, an X user (formerly Twitter) has edited a picture of Princess Kate and Prince William. At the same time, it hints at a conspiracy theory that the media has a hidden agenda when it comes to the British royal family.

– Why do the big media want us to believe that this is Kate and William, writes the X user under the edited photo which actually showed the first time the couple was in public while the flood of rumors was at its strongest.

The post is said to have been shared by 45 users who can all be traced back to a mother account called Mater Firs. This user bears the mark of being part of a Russian disinformation campaign called Doppelgänger, says Innes.

Doppelgänger involves the creation of fake newspapers to imitate credible, established, European and American newspapers. They like to use newspaper design that is reminiscent of what you see in newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

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Blamed MI6

Earlier this week, the investigative journalism newspaper The Insider wrote that Russian troll factories launched a campaign to blame Western intelligence services for the terrorist attack in Moscow.

One of the arguments of the users who shared the conspiracy against Western intelligence services was that MI6, i.e. British foreign intelligence, was quick to deny that the Ukrainians had anything to do with the case.

The disinformation campaign was initiated by the Russian computer companies National Technologies and Social Design Agency, both of which have been sanctioned by the EU due to strong links to the Kremlin, Facebook owner Meta says.

The trolls also used the Doppelgänger method by posing as, among other things, the major German newspaper Der Spiegel. These articles, as well as comments from fake users on social media, are then posted in the comment fields on posts about completely different topics, such as football.

Doppelgänger has also been accused of sharing fake articles from Fox News. The Telegraph writes that, among other things, they have shared fake quotes from Beyoncé where she claimed that the US was behind the explosion of the Nord Stream 2 gas cable and a fake quote from Cristiano Ronaldo who accused Ukraine of being charlatans.

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