Online harassment of Camilla, the Queen Consort and Meghan Markle has increased since the Queen’s death. TikTokers have brutally compared Camilla and Diana’s looks and spread misinformation about Meghan. In 2020, Meghan described the online abuse she faced as at one time “almost unsurvivable”.
As millions mourn the Queen’s death, Meghan Markle and Camilla Parker Bowles have once again found themselves the targets of online harassment and misinformation campaigns. TikTok videos mocking Meghan during the live broadcast of the Queen’s funeral on Monday have racked up millions of views. Another series of videos criticized Meghan’s funeral attire and accused her of copying an old Princess Diana outfit, even though the video — viewed more than 22.5 million times — preceded the funeral itself and used photos from Remembrance Day of 2019. For Gen Z users who mostly reside on TikTok, fictional depictions like “The Crown” (which started a new online harassment of Camilla after the affair was depicted) and TikToks about members of the royal family contribute to a new distaste for the Queen Consort. Algorithms based on engagement tend to amplify polarizing videos rather than cut them off, and online abuse and misinformation tend to go viral at an alarming rate – whether it’s misinformation about Markle’s funeral attire or the conspiracy that the Queen died of of the COVID-19 vaccine. Presentations of Camilla captioned “the new queen” or “his wife” juxtaposed with photos of Diana captioned “the real queen” and “his ex-wife” have been set to contemporary music and watched by hundreds of thousands of people. The hashtag “Cowmilla”, which refers to the Queen Consort, has been used in videos directing online harassment at Camilla, as well as videos exclusively criticizing Meghan. TikTok users pit Camilla against Diana in new wave of online harassment following Queen’s death.TikTok. @luckisonyoursidex The Sussexes quit social media due to ongoing harassment in January 2021, but Meghan said she was finally “ready for her next act” and teased a return to Instagram in an interview with The Cut last month. The story continues Meghan has been a lightning rod for online abuse and a staple of the British tabloids since she began a public relationship with Prince Harry in 2016, prompting the couple to announce they will “return as ‘senior members’” of the British royal family in January 2020 .In October of that year, Meghan described online abuse as “almost unsurvivable” in an appearance on the ‘Teenager Therapy’ podcast. “They tell me that in 2019 I was the most trolled person in the entire world — male or female,” Meghan said, adding that she wasn’t even “visible” for eight months of the year due to maternity leave. A viral TikTok about Meghan Markle “dressing up as Diana” to attend the Queen’s funeral, despite the fact that the video was posted before the funeral.TikTok. @notsoseriouss The 41-year-old former actress is a modern-day commitment to trolls, but this new wave of online harassment directed at 75-year-old Camilla is a revival of a larger vitriol that has recently become visible to young people. Many held Camilla responsible for the break-up of the marriage between King Charles and the late Princess Diana in the 1990s. “It’s actually almost unbelievable how much abuse Camilla took. I mean, she was called a hag, an old bag, a witch. I mean, those were the words they used for Camilla for years,” Tina Brown, author of The Palace Papers, he said in an April interview with the Washington Post. Brown went on to say that public opinion about Camilla became particularly heated after Diana’s death in 1997. “Camilla was the kind of ugly–you know, she was seen as the ugly kind of force that had driven, you know, Diana to such pain and sorrow, you know, I mean, the love that Charles had for her,” she said. In her famous 1995 interview with journalist Martin Bashir, Diana referred to her then-husband’s mistress and future wife as the “third person” in her marriage, and the British media called Camilla “the most hated woman in Britain”. Read the original article on Insider
