Sci-Tech
Kate Middleton, Britney Spears and the Online Trolls Doubting Their Existence
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Kate Middleton has long been a magnet for unproven rumors: She pressured an art gallery to remove a royal portrait! She split from her husband! She changed her hairstyle to distract from pregnancy rumors! She did not give birth to her daughter!
This year, speculation kicked into overdrive. Ms. Middleton — now Catherine, Princess of Wales — has lain low since Christmas. Kensington Palace said she was recovering from “a planned abdominal surgery” and unlikely to resume royal duties until after Easter. Conspiracy theorists had other, more sinister ideas. The only explanation for the future queen’s long absence, they said, was that she was missing, dying or deceased, and that someone was trying to cover it up.
“KATE MIDDLETON IS PROBABLY DEAD,” read one post on X, with the text flanked by skulls and screaming emojis.
In her invented death, the princess joins a host of other celebrities and public figures — from President Biden to Elon Musk — whom scores of online detectives have declared in recent months to be clones, body doubles, A.I.-generated avatars or otherwise not the living, breathing people they are.
For many of the people pushing the falsehoods, it is harmless fun: casual gumshoeing that lasts only a few clicks, a bonanza for meme generators. Others, however, spend “countless hours” on the pursuit, following other skeptics down rabbit holes and demanding that celebrities provide proof of life.
Whatever the motivation, what lingers is an urge to question reality, misinformation experts say. Lately, despite extensive and incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, the same sense of suspicion has contaminated conversations about elections, race, health care and climate.
Much of the internet now disagrees on basic facts, a phenomenon exacerbated by intensifying political polarization, distrust of institutions such as news and academia as well as the rise of artificial intelligence and other technologies that can warp people’s perception of truth.
In such an environment, celebrity conspiracy theories became a way to take control of “a really precarious, scary and unsettling moment,” said Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of media ethics and digital platforms at the University of Oregon.
“The darkness that is characterizing our politics is going to insert itself into even the more lighthearted articulations of speculation,” she said. “It just speaks to a sense of unease in the world.”
Pop culture history is suffused with post-mortem claims that famous dead people (like Elvis and Tupac) are still alive. Now comes the reverse.
In recent weeks, frenzied online chatter claimed that Catherine was dead or even in an induced coma — a rumor dismissed by the palace as “ludicrous.” Internet sleuths declared that photos of Catherine in cars with her mother and husband were actually another woman who lacked the princess’s facial moles.
Last week, the palace sparked more conjecture with a Mother’s Day image of the royal with her three children. Inconsistencies in the clothing and background of the portrait led to rumors that the image had been lifted from old photos in an attempt to hide her true whereabouts. By the time Catherine apologized for editing the image, the #WhereIsKateMiddleton hashtag was spreading on social media.
Another video of Catherine and her husband at a store in recent days was combed over by conspiracy theorists who said she looked too blurry, too healthy, too thin, too flat-haired, too unprotected by bodyguards to really be the princess. This week, after a video showing the Union flag at half-staff at Buckingham Palace began circulating, social media users interpreted the footage as a sign that either the princess or King Charles III, who has cancer, had died. The video turned out to be of a building in Istanbul in 2022, after Queen Elizabeth II died.
Recycled footage, easy-to-make computer-generated images, a general reluctance by most audiences to fact check easily debunked claims and even foreign disinformation efforts can help fuel doubt in celebrities’ existence or independence. There are rumors that Mr. Biden is played by several masked actors, including Jim Carrey. Mr. Musk is one of up to 30 clones, according to the rapper Kanye West (himself often said to be a clone). Last year, Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, was confronted during a streamed news conference by an A.I.-generated version of himself asking about his rumored body doubles.
Peeks into celebrities’ lives were once carefully curated and rationed through a limited set of media outlets, said Moya Luckett, a media historian at New York University. Few public figures faced the kind of uproar that Paul McCartney did in 1969, when a rumor circulated that the Beatle had died years earlier and had been replaced by a doppelgänger. The supposed evidence — winking lyrics and secret messages in reversed tracks on Beatles songs — so enthralled the public that Mr. McCartney sat through multiple interviews and photo shoots to prove his presence on the mortal coil.
These days, celebrity content is widely and constantly available. Public engagement is a crucial (and often solicited) part of the publicity apparatus; privacy is not. Reality is retouched and run through filters, allowing some public figures to appear ageless while sparking unreasonable suspicions about those who don’t.
When fans believe a famous person to be in distress, cracking the case is treated as a communal bonding activity born of “a sense of entitlement under the guise of concern,” Dr. Luckett said. She calls the practice “concern trolling.”
“It’s about wanting to control how this person responds to me, wanting to be part of their narrative: I’ve already exhausted all the information that’s been out there, and now I need more,” she said, noting that a similar impulse animates the current obsession with true crime tales. “I don’t think it’s necessarily that you want to rescue or help.”
Britney Spears, fresh out of a restrictive conservatorship, shared a series of unfiltered and often eccentric posts last year that some fans read as evidence that she had been replaced by a stand-in.
So-called Britney truthers analyzed what they considered to be discrepancies in Ms. Spears’s tattoos, the gaps in her teeth and the color of her eyes. In one forum, a thread titled “She’s Been Cloned!” garnered nearly 400 comments. A popular hashtag warped one of Ms. Spears’s best-known lyrics into #itsbritneyglitch, which appeared alongside claims that a look-alike was using an A.I. filter to mimic the singer online.
Ms. Spears, who was filmed in Las Vegas this year, has repeatedly dismissed falsehoods about her demise or brushes with death. “It makes me sick to my stomach that it’s even legal for people to make up stories that I almost died,” she wrote on Instagram in February last year. A few months later, she posted (and then deleted) “I am not dead people !!!” She was quoted by People in October saying, “No more conspiracy, no more lies.”
Conspiracy theory peddlers are not necessarily believers: Some of the top voices behind voter fraud lies have admitted in court that their claims were false. Ed Katrak Spencer, a lecturer in digital cultures at Queen Mary University of London, said publicly trying to unmask a bogus celebrity could feel playful.
This month, a years-old conspiracy theory involving the singer Avril Lavigne resurfaced in a tongue-in-cheek podcast from the comedian Joanne McNally, who named her first episode “What the Hell.” The claim — that Ms. Lavigne died and was supplanted by a doppelgänger — originated from a Brazilian blog called “Avril Está Morta,” or “Avril Is Dead,” which itself noted “how susceptible the world is to believing in things, no matter how strange they seem.” In 2017, more than 700 people signed an online petition pushing Ms. Lavigne and her double to provide “proof of life.”
“Fans are themselves vocal performers; the web and especially TikTok are platforms for performance,” Dr. Spencer said. “It’s more about content creation and circulation, with all of this existing as a kind of scene. It’s about the attention economy more than anything else.”
Dr. Spencer, who worked on academic papers on rumors related to Beyoncé, said it was possible to defang celebrity conspiracy theories. In 2020, a politician in Florida accused the singer of faking her Black heritage “for exposure” and said she was actually an Italian named Ann Marie Lastrassi in league with a deep-state plot involving the Black Lives Matter movement.
Her supporters, the BeyHive, adopted “Lastrassi” as a term of endearment and incorporated it into fan-fiction and online tributes. Beyoncé herself has addressed claims that she and her husband, Jay-Z, are in a secret society, singing on “Formation” that “y’all haters corny with that Illuminati mess.”
“It all comes back to the issue of authenticity, and the crisis of confidence in people’s perception of authenticity,” Dr. Spencer said. “People are constantly questioning what they’re seeing.”
Sci-Tech
Thieves snatched his phone in London
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![Akara Etteh Akara Etteh](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/480/cpsprodpb/5439/live/60980cd0-6abf-11ef-8c32-f3c2bc7494c6.jpg.webp)
Early on a Saturday morning in April, Akara Etteh was checking his phone as he came out of Holborn tube station, in central London.
A moment later, it was in the hand of a thief on the back of an electric bike – Akara gave chase, but they got away.
He is just one victim of an estimated 78,000 “snatch thefts” in England and Wales in the year to March, a big increase on the previous 12 months.
The prosecution rate for this offence is very low – the police say they are targeting the criminals responsible but cannot “arrest their way out of the problem”. They also say manufacturers and tech firms have a bigger role to play.
Victims of the crime have been telling the BBC of the impact it has had on them – ranging from losing irreplaceable photos to having tens of thousands of pounds stolen.
And for Akara, like many other people who have their phone taken, there was another frustration: he was able to track where his device went, but was powerless to get it back.
Phone pings around London
He put his iPhone 13 into lost mode when he got home an hour or so later – meaning the thieves couldn’t access its contents – and turned on the Find My iPhone feature using his laptop.
This allowed Akara to track his phone’s rough location and almost immediately he received a notification to say it was in Islington. Eight days later, the phone was pinging in different locations around north London again.
In a move says he “wouldn’t recommend” with hindsight, he went to two of the locations his phone had been in to “look around”.
“It was pretty risky,” he said. “I was fuelled by adrenaline and anger.”
![A map showing the phone's locations popping up across London, before appearing in China.](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/480/cpsprodpb/4db3/live/76fc0b20-6ba5-11ef-8c32-f3c2bc7494c6.png.webp)
He didn’t speak to anyone, but he felt he was being watched and went home.
“I am really angry,” he said. “The phone is expensive. We work hard to earn that money, to be able to buy the handset, and someone else says ‘screw that’.”
Then, in May, just over a month after the theft, Akara checked Find My iPhone again – his prized possession was now on the other side of the world – in Shenzhen, China.
Akara gave up.
It is not uncommon for stolen phones to end up in Shenzhen – where if devices can’t be unlocked and used again, they are disassembled for parts.
The city is home to 17.6 million people and is a big tech hub, sometimes referred to as China’s Silicon Valley.
Police could not help
In the moments after Akara’s phone was stolen, he saw police officers on the street and he told them what had happened. Officers, he said, were aware of thieves doing a “loop of the area” to steal phones, and he was encouraged to report the offence online, which he did.
A few days later, he was told by the Metropolitan Police via email the case was closed as “it is unlikely that we will be able to identify those responsible”.
Akara subsequently submitted the pictures and information he had gathered from the locations where his stolen phone had been. The police acknowledged receipt but took no further action.
The Metropolitan Police had no comment to make on Akara’s specific case, but said it was “targeting resources to hotspot areas, such as Westminster, Lambeth and Newham, with increased patrols and plain clothes officers which deter criminals and make officers more visibly available to members of the community”.
Lost photos of mum
Many other people have contacted the BBC with their experiences of having their phones taken. One, James O’Sullivan, 44, from Surrey, says he lost more than £25,000 when thieves used his stolen device’s Apple Pay service.
Meanwhile, Katie Ashworth, from Newcastle, explained her phone was snatched in a park along with her watch, and a debit card in the phone case.
“The saddest thing was that the phone contained the last photos I had of my mum on a walk before she got too unwell to really do anything – I would do anything to get those photos back,” the 36-year-old says.
Again, she says, there was a lack of action from the police.
“The police never even followed it up with me, despite my bank transactions showing exactly where the thieves went,” she said.
“The police just told me to check Facebook Marketplace and local second-hand shops like Cex.”
‘Battle against the clock’ for police
So why are the police seemingly unable to combat this offence – or recover stolen devices?
PC Mat Evans, who has led a team working on this kind of crime for over a decade within West Midlands Police, admitted that only “quite a low number” of phones that are stolen actually get recovered.
He says the problem is the speed with which criminals move.
“Phones will be offloaded to known fences within a couple of hours,” he said.
“It’s always a battle against the clock immediately following any of these crimes, but people should always report these things to the police, because if we don’t know that these crimes are taking place, we can’t investigate them.”
And sometimes just one arrest can make a difference.
“When we do catch these criminals, either in the act or after the fact, our crime rates tank,” he said.
“Quite often that individual has been responsible for a huge swathe of crime.”
But the problem is not just about policing.
In a statement, Commander Richard Smith from the National Police Chiefs’ Council, which brings together senior officers to help develop policing strategy, said it would “continue to target” the most prolific criminals.
“We know that we cannot arrest our way out of this problem,” he said.
“Manufacturers and the tech industry have an important role in reducing opportunities for criminals to benefit from the resale of stolen handsets.”
Tracking and disabling
![PC Mat Evans PC Mat Evans](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/480/cpsprodpb/2e51/live/021200a0-6c5c-11ef-bb13-858254fd6d28.png.webp)
Stolen phones can already be tracked and have their data erased through services such as “Find My iPhone” and “Find My Device”, from Android.
But policing minister Dame Diana Johnson said this week the government wanted manufacturers to ensure that any stolen phone could be permanently disabled to prevent it being sold second-hand.
Police chiefs will also be tasked with gathering more intelligence on who is stealing phones and where stolen devices end up.
A growing demand for second-hand phones, both in the UK and abroad, is believed to be a major driver behind the recent rise in thefts, the government said.
The Home Office is to host a summit at which tech companies and phone manufacturers will be asked to consider innovations that could help stop phones being traded illegally.
PC Evans said there was “no magic bullet”, but he said there was one thing manufacturers could do which would be “enormously helpful” to the police – more accurate tracking.
“At this moment in time, phone tracking is okay,” he said.
“But it’s not that scene in Total Recall yet, where you’re able to run around with a tracking device in your hand, sprinting down the road after a little bleeping dot.
“I appreciate it’s a big ask from the phone companies to make that a thing, but that would be enormously helpful from a policing perspective.”
Apple and Android did not provide the BBC with a statement, but Samsung said it was “working closely with key stakeholders and authorities on the issue of mobile phone theft and related crimes”.
Additional reporting by Tom Singleton
Sci-Tech
Google abusing ad tech dominance, UK competition watchdog finds
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Google uses anti-competitive practices to dominate the market for online advertising technology, a UK watchdog has provisionally found.
The potentially unlawful behaviour could be harming thousands of UK publishers and advertisers, an investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has warned.
It accuses Google of preventing rivals from “competing on a level playing field” with its own tech for the billions of pounds spent by UK businesses on online advertising.
Google said the watchdog’s findings were “flawed” and said it would respond.
According to the CMA, the vast majority of businesses use Google’s services when placing digital ads on websites.
Google maintains it has a strong business incentive to help UK firms thrive, and argues that advertisers choose to use Google because its products work well and help their businesses grow.
The watchdog will now consider representations from Google before deciding what action to take.
If Google is found to have broken competition law, the watchdog could impose a financial penalty of up to 10% of annual worldwide group turnover and issue legally binding directions to the firm.
“We’ve provisionally found that Google is using its market power to hinder competition when it comes to the ads people see on websites,” Juliette Enser, the CMA’s interim executive director of enforcement, said in a statement.
She pointed out that many businesses were able to keep their digital content free by using revenue from digital adverts, which reach millions of people across the UK.
“That’s why it’s so important that publishers and advertisers – who enable this free content – can benefit from effective competition and get a fair deal when buying or selling digital advertising space,” she wrote.
But Google’s vice president of global ads, Dan Taylor argued the search giant’s advertising technology helped websites and apps fund their content, and effectively reach new customers.
“The core of this case rests on flawed interpretations of the ad tech sector. We disagree with the CMA’s view and we will respond accordingly,” he wrote.
Google’s activities in ad tech are also subject to continuing probes by the US Department of Justice and the European Commission.
Competition economist Dr Cristina Caffarra, told the BBC that while the CMA’s statement of objections certainly presented “another headache” for Google, the regulator was merely “joining the club” of those who have already taken action.
“The UK is by no means some sort of pathfinder here,” she said.
The Department of Justice, state of Texas – which along with nine other states sued Google over alleged abuse of its ad tech dominance in 2020 – and the EU are all far ahead, Dr Caffarra added.
In 2023, EU competition regulators told Google it might need to sell part of its ad-tech business to address their concerns.
But the tech-giant has argued this would be a “disproportionate” step.
Separately, Google is seeking to appeal a UK court decision in June to allow a £13.6bn collective-action lawsuit against it to proceed.
The case alleges the search giant behaved in an anti-competitive way which caused online publishers in the UK to lose money.
Google has vowed to oppose the claim “vigorously and on the facts”.
Additional reporting by Liv McMahon
Sci-Tech
Could PS5’s old-school adventure be a lesson for Sony?
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![Sony A screenshot of Astro Bot - a white, cute robot with light blue eyes - dressed to resemble Kratos, the protagonist from God of War. Astro has a beard, and wears a leather outfit with lots of buckles and a fur collar. Astro stands next to a chopping block, holding a large axe and is surrounded by logs.](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/480/cpsprodpb/ef71/live/5914c600-6c28-11ef-b43e-6916dcba5cbf.png.webp)
It’s just a few hours before reviews of one of the year’s biggest PlayStation 5 releases arrive, and its director is talking about food.
Buffets, to be precise.
You might get a lot for your money, but how do you feel afterwards?
“Bloated, you’ve eaten too much and you just want to go and sleep,” says Nicolas Doucet, head of Sony-owned studio Team Asobi.
Gamers are fond of food metaphors. Developers don’t just make games, they “cook”. If you’re spoilt for choice with high quality new releases, you’re “eatin’ good”.
But Nicolas is referring to the sense that blockbuster publishers have tended to have an all-you-can-eat approach when it comes to making games.
For a while now, the industry’s biggest players have been focused on producing open-world titles offering dozens of hours of gameplay, or on attempts to muscle into the lucrative online market.
Both genres have produced some huge hits, but Nicolas wonders if there is an appetite for something more like “that two-course meal that is going to be just the right amount”.
Astro Bot could be just the recipe Sony has been looking for.
Earlier this week the Japanese company announced it was pulling Concord – one of its other recent big games – from sale after a tepid response from critics and players.
The online shooter is the latest high-profile bid to corner the so-called “live service” market dominated by the likes of Fortnite and Apex Legends that’s failed to attract a large audience.
But in a quiet year for first-party PlayStation releases, Astro Bot has received some of the highest review scores of 2024 and some critics say it’s one of Sony’s best in ages.
At its heart it’s an old-school 3D platformer that’s crammed full of references to PlayStation’s 30-year history.
The game’s main objective is to rescue 300 Astro Bots hidden around various themed levels, with about half of those decked out in cosplay to resemble characters from the console’s past.
But as much as it’s a nostalgic reminder of Sony’s great successes, could it also be a lesson for the company’s future?
![Team Asobi Five white, robotic cats with black screens for faces train their bright blue LED eyes on a board decorated to look like a piece of cheese with a mouse in the middle. A smaller robot peeks through a hole in the middle of the board, his blue eyes looking nervously to the side.](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/480/cpsprodpb/feb4/live/e15803d0-6c2b-11ef-b970-9f202720b57a.png.webp)
If you’re one of the world’s 60 million PlayStation 5 owners, you’re almost certainly familiar with Astro Bot.
The cute mascot character appeared in 2020’s Astro’s Playroom, a short, three-hour adventure pre-installed on every machine.
It was designed to act as a tech demo for the hardware and its advanced controller, but people loved it.
“And it did highlight perhaps the fact that people are craving for these kind of games,” says Nicolas.
Releasing a 3D platformer in 2024 is, on paper, a daunting prospect. Nicolas admits the genre – a staple of the PlayStation 2 era – isn’t very common these days.
And, he says: “The ones that do exist are very, very high quality from people who’ve been making them for years and years.”
It’s also a genre Sony has moved away from recently, and its biggest releases have been more adult, cinematic titles such as God of War and The Last of Us.
Nicolas thinks this is a sign of audiences, and the developers making games for them, maturing.
But he admits that left a gap which Team Asobi – a relatively young studio – was eager to fill.
“I think there needs to be more games that are there just to relax, have a little bit of fun, that are not dramatic, that are not necessarily heavily story driven, where you can just mess around with a game and it’s fun,” says Nicolas.
“But, of course, it needs to be executed well.”
Astro Bot’s been widely praised for its polish, attention to detail and the way it plays, drawing comparisons with Mario – for many, the undisputed king of 3D platformers.
Nicolas considers descriptions of Astro Bot as “old school” a compliment and that going “back to basics” helped with the game’s development.
As concerns grow over spiralling budgets, Astro Bot was made in three-and-a-half years by a team of about 65 people – a relatively short time and small staff by modern standards.
Nicolas says the game’s bite-sized nature – it’s divided across 50 short, playable stages – helped to simplify development and made it easier to “swap things around”.
“Whereas when you’re tied to something that is one storyline, one timeline that is set, it’s very difficult,” he says.
“You have less flexibility.”
![Team Asobi A screenshot shows Astro Bot clinging to a flying PS5 controller as it swoops close to the surface of the sea, throwing spray up into the air. Rocky obstacles line the route to his destination - a distant island with a wrecked ship on its shore.](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/480/cpsprodpb/0c13/live/b383cef0-6c2e-11ef-b970-9f202720b57a.png.webp)
Sony will now be hoping that Astro Bot’s glowing reception translates into big sales, but comparisons with Concord’s swift fall have already begun.
It’s also shone a light on characters Sony could revive, and prompted some people to question whether the company will shift its recent focus on the live-service market.
Under previous PlayStation boss Jim Ryan, the company announced plans to launch 12 online-focused games. It’s since scaled that back to six.
As for single-player titles, some of Sony’s biggest in-house studios haven’t yet revealed PS5 projects.
Hermen Hulst, one of two new CEOs in charge of Sony’s gaming division, told the BBC in a statement it was “very important we offer a wide variety of titles to our community” and that “Astro Bot fills an important part of our portfolio”.
He praised Team Asobi for creating “something special that is light-hearted and delightful” with “incredibly fun gameplay”.
Astro Bot is also “a great opportunity for families to game together”, he said.
Nicolas opts not to comment on the Concord situation or bigger, strategic moves, but he does agree with his boss that Astro Bot has given PS5 a game that can “bridge generations”.
Many reviewers have remarked on how cameos from the past have reminded them of growing up with Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter or the cast of Ape Escape – characters that set them on the path to becoming gamers.
Nicolas says he often gets messages from parents who’ve played Astro’s Playroom with their children talking about their experiences, and he hopes that the new game will create more shared moments.
“I’m really happy that, besides the game itself, there’s a greater good, if you like, that we’re able to tell stories like that,” he says.
“And I really hope that we can brighten some people’s homes thanks to that experience.”
Additional reporting by Tom Gerken.
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