Two things can be true at the same time: Something weird seems to be going on with Catherine, Princess of Wales, and the internet has entirely broken our collective ability to see perfectly plausible explanations as likely scenarios.
Evidence for the first part is omnipresent and changing by the hour. Catherine has not been seen in public since the holidays — by now an over-two-month absence from her official duties as a high-ranking member of the British royal family. This does match the timeline originally offered by Kensington Palace in January: that Catherine would be undergoing a “planned abdominal surgery” and would not be back to her official duties until “after Easter.” But it does not match the typical cheery PR moves of the royal family when it is faced with a health crisis (see: Charles’s cancer diagnosis). The slow burn of curiosity about the princess’s status accelerated into a bonfire over the weekend when Catherine and William’s official Instagram account released a photo of her with their children that appeared to be poorly Photoshopped in several places. The AP circulated a “kill notification,” informing publications not to release the image and noted that “it appears the source has manipulated the image.” Then came a tweet from the Prince and Princess of Wales’s official Twitter account, casually signed “C” for “Catherine”:
It does seem like something is going on with Kate Middleton.
But the question of what, and how much any of this matters, has been completely obscured by the widespread loss of Occam’s razor. Once a decent, all-purpose rule to apply for most half-understood mysteries, the idea is that the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one. This has been flushed down the discourse drain and completely buried by an avalanche of theories: Catherine’s dead, she left William and refuses to play along with palace PR, the photo was edited from images taken in November 2023, her face is taken from a Vogue photo shoot, she’s in rehab — anything and everything more nefarious, elaborate, or scandalous than the simplest reason, which is that she’s recovering from abdominal surgery.
Social media is partly to blame here because when you hear hooves it’s more fun to make posts about zebras than horses. But bad actors increasingly concoct online conspiracies on purpose, with the deliberate intention of creating layers of signals and avenues of inference to confuse and mislead. The internet is full of trails of bread crumbs, scattered throughout Reddit forums, Instagram posts, and YouTube breakdowns, and they’re absorbing because they’re inclusive. Anyone can be the detective who finds more evidence, and everyone’s evidence can be pooled together in a universal game of finding (or creating) symbols and then decoding them. It’s as true for QAnon as it is for clues about upcoming Taylor Swift albums, speculation on Love Is Blind cast members, and theories about Sarah J. Maas plots. Why believe a boring, simple explanation when there’s so much more communal pleasure in reading the tea leaves and engaging in rampant speculation? Especially when, as is often true for Swift, the conspiracy’s subject seems to be playing along and the careful collection of clues and patterns eventually produces results.
It gets easy to lose perspective. Is the simplest explanation that an image of Catherine and her three children was stitched together out of photos from an event four months ago, which would entail painstakingly retouching her sweater to be a different color and entirely changing the pattern on George’s collared shirt but at the same time leaving clumsy editing artifacts on Charlotte’s skirt and Catherine’s zipper? Or is it that the kids wore some of the same clothing for a family shoot and took several photos to make one where everyone was smiling nicely? One of Catherine’s hands is blurrier than the other — maybe it’s an elaborate cover-up, or maybe one hand was in motion while squeezing a wiggly kid?
The problem is that Catherine’s is the worst possible case for furiously insisting that everything’s actually normal and internet commenters have lost all sense of proportion. The photo might well have been taken in March (Windsor is in gardening zone 8 — there could be green leaves!), but it doesn’t matter: The image is edited in some absurdly inept ways. This several weeks’ absence from public life does represent a notable departure from typical royal protocol, a departure of the exact sort apparently denied to Meghan Markle in 2019. And the explanatory tweet makes everything seem only weirder, more calculated, and more nefarious. Why make “C” take the blame for badly cutting together a family photo? Why not post an unedited version? If the explanation is simple, why has the narrative around it become so complex?
But these are not contradictory ideas. Catherine may be going through some private experiences she does not want to share widely, and the internet has broken everyone’s ability to assess what’s a supervillain-level cover-up and what’s more likely to be something sad and mundane. And also, Kensington Palace has seriously screwed up its public response to every even vaguely imperfect blip in these people’s lives since Edward VIII abdicated in 1936, and the internet has magnified its PR faults a thousandfold. So if the simplest explanation is the truest, then in this case, there’s one other simple interpretation that seems very hard to avoid: The monarchy is not built for this era.
