Whe the British tabloid  Sun published images of the Prince and Princess of Wales shopping at a farm shop at the weekend the newspaper said their aim was an attempt " to end weeks of online speculation which has seen wild conspiracy theories about Kate spread unchecked”.

It, however, didn't take much before their attempt fell flat. Those videos and pieces that grounded The Sun's bid scaled new heights of virality.

“Do you believe this is Kate Middleton?” is the caption of one TikTok video that has been viewed a whopping  3.5m times, reports The Guardian.

Frenzied online speculation continue to swirl around the  princess’s whereabouts. And the outlandish theories have never been in short supply.

If you got any doubt, delve into the findings by

BrandMentions, a company that monitors the spread of hashtags and keywords online.

Their findings are loud and clear. Over  the past seven days the hashtags #whereiskate #katebodydouble and #katemiddleton have been used on social media accounts and webpages with a total reach of 400 million people, as measured by factors such as account followers.

Kate's absense posts are also trending on Pixstory as I write this.  Look at the growing online enormity of them.

The hashtags were mentioned 5,400 times, with Instagram accounting for more than eight out of 10 mentions, followed by TikTok, which accounted for 5% of mentions. Posts with those hashtags have been shared 2.3m times and liked 2.2m times.

The speculation has been truly global, with the biggest reach for the three hashtags on Facebook coming from the India Today news magazine page, while one of the biggest reaches on Instagram is from the account of Diario Libre, a newspaper in the Dominican Republic, which has 1.8 million followers.

As you would have expected, some fake news too got amplified.

After rumours of a death or divorce in the royal family began to spread on social media, the hashtag #royalannouncement began to trend on X early on Monday morning.  That could be par for the course considering how many of us love to fish in rumour water, hoping that we get some snippets that help us meet our ends.

Poor Kate Middleton!