The great Kate Middleton backtracking

The internet is scrambling to erase the past few weeks of speculation.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

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On Friday afternoon, Kate Middleton put an end to the months-long discourse about her health and whereabouts in about the most humbling way possible: by announcing she has cancer. In one two-minute Instagram video, she explained  her apparent weight loss and family’s retreat from public life—and revealed so much of the internet theorizing about her health and her marriage as the salacious speculation that it was.

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Conspiracy theories about the royals are not new. There are still entire subreddits dedicated to Meghan Markle’s supposed manipulation of Prince Harry, and even the circumstances of the Princess Diana’s tragic death are still needlessly debated. But KateGate is the first one (in my memory) that broke out of containment. What started in the relative privacy of forums swiftly made its way to videos, podcasts, and people’s public Instagram stories. Now we’re witnessing a great unwriting of these narratives, as jokes about the Princess’s disappearance and long winded accusations of infidelity went from harmless to cruel in a matter of seconds.