Emmanuelle Ducros 8:58 a.m., March 12, 2024

Every morning after the 8:30 a.m. news, Emmanuelle Ducros reveals to listeners her “Journey into absurdity”, from Monday to Thursday.

This Tuesday morning, the unfailing recipe for global conspiracy theory.

Quick recipe;

less than a day to get a deluxe conspiracy theory.

The ingredients: we need a quality character.

Kate Middleton Princess of Wales.

A good recipe is above all a good product, capable of arousing fantasy.

We must organize a scarcity effect.

Let's say that it would disappear from circulation two long months after a mysterious operation.

So much for the preparation.

After that ?

Subtle dosage of unconsciousness and amateurism.

An undated official photo is published on social networks.

A seemingly innocuous cliché for Mother's Day.

The princess and her children laughing on a terrace.

The photo is captioned “thank you for the support and encouragement over the last two months”.

The photo is credited to the heir to the Crown, Prince William himself.

Leave to marinate for a few minutes.

We observe the intense fermentation that occurs.

It swells, it foams.

And it spills out of the dish

It's spectacular.

Within minutes, the photo was reverse engineered by the global public.

Something is wrong.

Here one of Princess Charlotte's sleeves has been erased.

There, the jacquard pattern of Little Prince George's sweater is duplicated in an illogical way.

Kate Middleton's face which seems copied from an old photo, arms which adopt a strange pose, a missing wedding ring... The awful evidence: the Windsors lied, the family photo was retouched with a trowel.

Viewed 81 million times in just a few hours.

Important and crucial step in the recipe, the validation of doubt by an authority.

The major news agencies (AP, Reuters, AFP) remove the image from their feeds, explaining that it has been manipulated.

Nothing like it to spice up a story like never before... The madness machine is launched.

We can hardly do worse than a false image to reassure.

Oh yes, we can.

A new message from Kate Middleton on social networks explaining that like any amateur photographer, she likes to retouch her photos.

Apotheosis.

Waves of theories on the why and how of retouching.

By wanting to calm the story, the communicators gave it a hundred times greater resonance.

Beginner's mistake.

This backlash is called the Streisand effect.

It takes its name from the singer Barbara Streisand who, in 2003, wanting to prevent the publication of aerial photos of her house through a lawsuit, brought the whole world together.

Windsor effect.

What happened with this photo?

Do we have the end of the story?

No way.

But we can read hundreds of articles who know nothing about it, listen to analysts who don't have the slightest idea explain that it's the end of the monarchy, thousands and thousands of messages from the usual conspiracy theorists who stick their vaccination obsessions on this “photogate”.

We usually.

The mechanism is the same each time.

But there, we were able to observe the phenomenon in accelerated motion, in full light, and on a global scale.

Fascinating, unstoppable.

And to be honest, despairing of irrationality.

It's people... But the mechanism is the same for the most serious subjects.