Add Category
It should have been an easy PR win for The Prince and Princess of Wales.
On Sunday March 10, UK Mother's Day or "Mothering Sunday", the photo went up on their official social media accounts — a casually dressed Catherine, Princess of Wales, George, Louis and Charlotte gathered round, the children's beaming faces framing their mother's like flower petals.
The casually composed photo was laden with messaging: aspirational motherhood, childhood wholesomeness, vitality, ease and happiness. It was easy to imagine Prince William in dad mode behind the camera, shouting silly jokes to make the children laugh.
It fairly screamed: "Royals! They're just like us!"
But the biggest message it was trying to send was to the terminally online, who were already awash in speculation and conspiracy theories over #WhereIsKate.
Despite Kensington Palace stating the princess would be out of action until after Easter due to planned abdominal surgery, the internet was suss.
By this point Kensington Palace had already broken its own red line of providing updates only when there was "significant new information to share", issuing a second statement saying, essentially, that they would still be saying nothing.
A statement about nothing gives a very strong Seinfeld vibe but, in the world of royal correspondents, it was considered significant.
"Social media has been the driving force behind this entire saga," said Ellie Hall, Buzzfeed's former longtime royal correspondent, in an interview with Nieman Journalism Lab.
"I cannot emphasise enough how out of character it is that a royal press team went on the record in response to what is essentially gossip."
An ecosystem primed for mistrust
Anyway, we all know what happened next: The story went away.
JK! It snowballed from a messy online situation into a legitimate global news event over some clunky photoshop edits, apparently done by the future Queen of the United Kingdom.
The internet was emboldened. More memes were born.
Jean Burgess is a distinguished professor of digital media at QUT, whose research focuses on the social implications of digital media technologies, platforms and cultures.
She says Kate's "photo-editing experiment" landed straight in the crosshairs of a social media ecosystem primed for mistrust and conspiracy theories (think COVID and Donald Trump), and rising fears over generative AI (think creepy Midjourney AI hands).
"You've got these kind of ready-made architectures of conspiracy that are ready to jump on a key media moment like this," Burgess says.
"That's surrounded by uncertainty, and that connects also to a huge amount of mainstream media industry interest.
"So it's kind of a perfect storm of attention and conspiracy theory and sleuthing on the part of internet citizens.
"It also comes along at a time where we're having a broader conversation, a public conversation about AI, and about manipulated media and about deep fakes."
Growing distrust: flipping the royal script
No surprises then, when The Sun and TMZ reported sightings and apparent footage of a dressed-down William and Kate taking a "happy and relaxed" stroll in Windsor earlier this week.
The #WhereisKate truthers were unconvinced.
A candid athleisure capture — while a classic of the celebrity paparazzi genre — can't contain this situation.
"The codes and conventions and norms of social media platforms just rub against that mainstream PR kind of mentality in ways that, as we've just seen, are very, very tricky to navigate," says Burgess.
On top of that, Prince Harry's memoir spilling the tea on royal family media backstabbing , six seasons of The Crown, Meghan and Harry's Oprah interview, and their six-part Netflix documentary have all reset public expectations and perceptions of The Firm.
"Over the past few years, people have started to really distrust not just the royal family (as an institution/bureaucracy, not necessarily the individual members) but the reporters and outlets that cover the royal family," said former royal correspondent Hall.
"I'm not saying this is the Crown's fault, but it doesn't help matters that, for years, pop culture has been dominated by a fictionalised narrative that depicts the monarchy and its employees scheming behind the scenes and manipulating the media, happily throwing certain members of the royal family under a bus in service to the overriding goal of preserving the power of the sovereign."
Loading Instagram content
It's also hard to square the logic behind the social media strategy being used by the Prince and Princess of Wales to quiet online speculation.
How do you leverage the power of the internet at the same time that you want to be above the internet?
"Even with the younger generation of Royals … there is a kind of script in terms of how they expect their … official media releases to be treated by the press," says Burgess.
"[Putting] an obviously heavily photoshopped photograph out onto Twitter … as a high-profile person … I think it would inevitably attract … every conspiracy theory, every debate, every bit of polarisation."
For an alternate case study, take a look at how the Duchess of Sussex recently soft-launched her new lifestyle brand, the triple-barrelled American Riviera Orchard: a 3x3 Instagram grid revealing the name and logo, comments off, and let the internet and media do the rest. A master class in brand teasing, no notes.
"[Harry and Meghan] are both clearly far better at engaging in what we call the platform vernaculars of Instagram," says Burgess.
"[Meghan's] focusing on 'what's the most Instagrammy way to do it?', rather than, 'how can I somehow use the audience of social media to do what the royal family's media people [want]?"
What happens next?
Can the Prince and Princess of Wales keep living in their internet castle in the sky, posting photogenic missives from above without fully contending — and engaging with — the dynamics of how the internet internets?
The narrative has escaped their grasp, and trust has been broken.
We're already seeing that another official photo taken by Catherine has been flagged for digital manipulation.
For an institution keenly aware that its relevance is reliant on public sentiment and media coverage, it's an existential question.