Kensington Palace Is Battling Online Abus Aimed At Meghan and Kate
Meghan and Kate have become the subjects of abusive comments, forcing Kensington Palace to monitor social media channels to detect and manage threats.
Vile sexist comments, racist slurs and personal attacks against Meghan and Kate are becoming a norm on social media. They’ve even been threatened with violence.
HELLO! reveals that the increasing number of insults have forced Kensington Palace to intervene, with the palace’s staff spending hours online “deleting and reporting” comments and posts. One source told the magazine: “The Palace has always monitored comments but it’s a hugely time-consuming thing.
“They can block certain words, but some of it is quite serious.
“Over the course of last year, with hundreds of thousands of comments, there were two or three that were violent threats.
“You can delete and report and block people and the police have options around particular people.
“It’s something you have to manage because there’s no other way to control it.”
Although the slurs can’t be addressed directly to the Duchess of Sussex and the Duchess of Cambridge, due to the fact that they don’t have individual public social media accounts, the users find other channels on which they can unleash their fury.
One source said: “A lot of hours are being spent reviewing old material and moderating comments under posts.”
You can find offensive comments under news articles and news outlets’ social media.
To better tackle this problem, Kensington Palace has turned to Instagram, which has a team dedicated to helping high profile followers and accounts for coping with unpleasant and abusive comments.
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Within the past months, Meghan has been attacked for wearing tight dresses “to get attention” or walking “strangely”.
Some users on Twitter went as far as claiming Meghan’s pregnancy is “fake”.
Previously Express.co.uk has revealed vile trolls are spreading claims Meghan’s pregnancy is “fake”.
“I’m definitely ‘educated’ and I still think everything about Meghan is fake, including her pregnancy.”
Kate though has been accused of being “boring” and “lazy”, and the number of attacks against her increased as the alleged feud between the Duchess’ was raging.
The Kensington Palace source added: “It follows a Kate vs Meghan narrative and some of the worst stuff is between Kate fans and Meghan fans.
“Arguments about who looks more appropriate, for example, that turn into personal attacks on other users.
“It’s creating a supercharged atmosphere and everyone can join in, but what are the consequences of this?”
HELLO! has launched a campaign called #HelloToKindness which calls for positivity online following the increasing number of verbal abuse and threats against the duchesses.