Trace back the digitally altered photograph of Catherine, Princess of Wales, and its roots lie in a tragedy of another Princess of Wales, Diana, whose death in 1997 predated the creation of Facebook by nearly seven years.
威尔士王妃凯瑟琳数码修改照片的根源可以追溯到另一位威尔士王妃戴安娜的悲剧，她于1997年去世，比Facebook的诞生早了近七年。

Diana’s fatal car accident, after a high-speed pursuit by photographers in Paris, left a lasting imprint on her sons, William and Harry. They grew up vowing not to take part in what they viewed as a pathological relationship between the royal family and the press, one in which they were the abused partners.
戴安娜在巴黎被摄影师高速追逐后发生致命车祸，给她的儿子威廉和哈里留下了永久的印记。在他们看来，王室和媒体之间存在病态的关系，他们是这种关系中受虐待的一方，他们从小就发誓绝不参与其中。

The rise of social media gave this younger generation of royals a way to bypass the tabloids they reviled, with popular platforms like Instagram and Twitter, where they could post carefully curated news and images of themselves, unmediated by the London papers or the lurking paparazzi.
社交媒体的兴起为年轻一代的王室成员提供了途径，可以绕过他们所唾弃的小报，他们可以在Instagram和Twitter等流行平台上发布自己精心策划的新闻和照片，同时不受伦敦报纸或潜伏狗仔队的干扰。

But now they are experiencing the darker side of public life in the wild west of the web. Catherine’s photo, posted on social media and picked up by newspapers and broadcasters worldwide, has been swept into the maelstrom of rumors and conspiracy theories that have haunted her since she underwent abdominal surgery and receded from the public eye two months ago.
但现在，他们正在网络的荒蛮世界体验公共生活的阴暗面。凯瑟琳的照片发布在社交媒体上，被世界各地的报纸和广播公司转载，这张照片被卷入了谣言和阴谋论的漩涡，自她接受腹部手术并在两个月前从公众视线中消失以来，这些谣言和阴谋论一直困扰着她。

While William and Harry have struggled with these forces, the pressure has perhaps been most acute on their wives, Catherine and Meghan, who have taken turns being in the eye of an online storm. Meghan spoke recently about the “hateful” treatment she experienced while pregnant with her children.
虽然威廉和哈里一直在与这些力量作斗争，但他们的妻子凯瑟琳和梅根承受的压力可能是最大的，她们轮流处于网络风暴的中心。梅根最近谈到她在怀孕期间经历的“仇恨”对待。

“It must be so hard to deal with this,” said Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, the director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University. “It is often women who are subjected to the worst bullying and harassment.”
“处理这种事肯定很难，”牛津大学路透新闻研究所主任拉斯穆斯·克莱因斯·尼尔森说。“遭受最严重霸凌和骚扰的往往是女性。”

Catherine, of course, inadvertently contributed to the hothouse atmosphere by altering the Mother’s Day photo of herself and her three children. That unleashed a fresh storm of online speculation, with people sharing pet theories about how the image had been manipulated, whether by transposing Catherine’s head from a 2016 cover photo in Vogue magazine or recycling a shot of the family taken last November.
当然，凯瑟琳修改她和三个孩子的母亲节照片无意中加剧了这种气氛。这在网上引发了一场新的猜测风暴，人们分享自己最中意的理论，猜测这张照片是如何被修改的，究竟是从2016年《Vogue》杂志的封面照片上拿来了凯瑟琳的头部，还是回收利用了去年11月拍摄的一张家庭照片。

Visual investigators debunked both suggestions, but that didn’t stop the original posts from going viral, with one post promoting the Vogue theory racking up more than 45 million views.
视觉调查人员驳斥了这两种说法，但这并没有阻止最初的帖子的病毒式传播，其中一篇宣称使用了《Vogue》照片的帖子获得了超过4500万的点击量。

Having set out to control her image, Catherine now finds herself in a predicament not unlike some of her royal forebears, dogged by an online pack no less feral than the photographers who chased Diana in Paris.
凯瑟琳努力控制自己的形象，但却陷入了一种和她的一些王室前辈别无二致的困境，网上追逐的狂热程度丝毫不亚于在巴黎追逐戴安娜的摄影师，令她深受其扰。

“Anyone in the royal family or their staffs who thinks that social media allows people to circumvent gatekeepers or control the narrative has not been paying attention to Meghan Markle’s experience,” Professor Nielsen said.
“如果王室成员和他们的工作人员以为社交媒体可以让人绕过把关者，或者控制叙事，那他们肯定没有注意到梅根·马克尔经历了什么，”尼尔森说。

“These are deeply ambiguous spaces,” he said, “in which things that people want are inextricably linked with things that are deeply troubling.”
“这些空间非常模糊，”他说，“在这里，人们想要的东西与令人深感不安的东西密不可分。”

William and Harry made their first official foray into social media in 2015, when they, along with Catherine, opened shared Twitter and Instagram accounts. An early post showed Harry, standing on his tiptoes, next to the 7-foot, 2-inch retired American basketball star, Dikembe Mutombo, at a coaching program for young people.
2015年，威廉和哈里首次正式涉足社交媒体，当时他们和凯瑟琳一起开设了共享的Twitter和Instagram账户。一个早期帖子显示，在一堂篮球青训课上，哈里踮着脚尖，站在身高约2.2米的美国退役篮球明星迪肯贝·穆托姆博旁。

When Harry met Meghan, an American actress, the following year, he was exposed to an avid and expert user of social media. Meghan was running a lifestyle blog, The Tig, which she described as “a hub for the discerning palate.” Cosmopolitan magazine once said it was “well on the way to becoming the next Goop,” the wellness brand owned by the actress Gwyneth Paltrow.
第二年，哈里遇到了美国女演员梅根，由此见识到了一个狂热而专业的社交媒体用户。梅根当时经营着生活方式博客The Tig，她称之为“挑剔品味中心”。《时尚》(Cosmopolitan)杂志说，它“正在成为下一个Goop”——也就是演员格温妮丝·帕特洛拥有的健康品牌。

Meghan shut down The Tig after her romance with Harry became public. But she brought her astute use of social media with her into the royal family. When the couple announced in 2020 that they planned to withdraw from royal duties, they broke the news on Instagram and laid out their plans on Sussex Royal, a site designed by the same Toronto-based digital firm that had designed The Tig.
在和哈里的恋情公开后，她关闭了The Tig。但她把自己对社交媒体的精明运用带进了王室。这对夫妇2020年宣布计划退出王室时，他们是在Instagram上发布了这一消息，并在“苏塞克斯王室”网站上公布了该计划，网站由设计The Tig的同一家多伦多数字公司设计。

When Meghan was targeted by abusive language online, Harry blamed it on hostile and racist press coverage. In his memoir, “Spare,” he wrote that, in the 18 months before his 2018 marriage, relentless tabloid coverage of Meghan had “riled up all the trolls, who were now crawling out of their cellars and lairs.”
当梅根在网上被辱骂时，哈里将其归咎于充满敌意和种族主义的媒体报道。他在回忆录《备胎》(Spare)中写道，在他2018年结婚前的18个月里，小报对梅根的无情报道“引出了所有的网络喷子，他们正从地窖和巢穴里爬出来”。

“Ever since we’d acknowledged we were a couple,” Harry said, “we’d been flooded with racist taunts and death threats on social media.”
“自从我们承认相恋以来，”哈利说，“我们就被社交媒体上的种族主义嘲讽和死亡威胁淹没了。”

Yet, in Catherine’s case, the lack of press reports may have contributed to the rumors mushrooming online. Kensington Palace, where she and her husband, William, have their offices, erected a veil of privacy around Catherine after her surgery, offering few details about her condition or recovery, beyond saying she would return to work after Easter.
然而，就凯瑟琳的情况而言，缺乏新闻报道可能是导致网上谣言不断涌现的原因。凯特和丈夫威廉在肯辛顿宫办公。在凯特手术后，肯辛顿宫为她蒙上了一层隐蔽面纱，没有透露她的病情或恢复情况，只是说她将在复活节后重新履行王室职责。

“The near silence over Kate’s health, which she’s perfectly entitled to observe, spooked the media and generated a social media frenzy that the mainstream media fed off,” said Peter Hunt, a former royal correspondent for the BBC.
“凯特对自己的健康状况近乎保持沉默，她完全有权这样做，但这惊动了媒体，在社交媒体上引发了一场狂热，主流媒体也从中受益，”BBC前王室记者彼得·亨特说。

For all the ravenous coverage of the royal family, some subjects are off limits. Gossip about William and Catherine’s marriage has long percolated in the web’s murky depths, for instance. But it rarely, if ever, surfaces in the papers, which adhere to strict guidelines on privacy, enforced by Britain’s robust defamation laws.
尽管对王室的报道如饥似渴，但有些话题是不能谈论的。例如，关于威廉和凯瑟琳婚姻状况的流言蜚语一直在网络的阴暗深处流传。但在英国严格的诽谤法约束下，报纸严格遵守隐私保护准则，因此这些流言几乎从来不会出现在报纸上。

When a grainy photo of Catherine riding in a car with her mother appeared on the American gossip site, TMZ, last week, British papers did not publish it out of deference to Kensington Palace’s appeal that she be allowed to recuperate in peace.
上周，美国八卦网站TMZ上出现了一张凯瑟琳和母亲坐在一辆车里的模糊照片，出于对肯辛顿宫呼吁让她安静休养的尊重，英国报纸没有刊登这张照片。

Even now, in the wake of Catherine’s confession that she had retouched the photo, a few tabloids have rallied to her defense. “Lay off Kate,” read the front page of The Sun, which is published by Rupert Murdoch and typically gives the princess generous coverage. “Attacks over edited pic are absurd,” it added.
即使是现在，在凯瑟琳承认她修过那张照片之后，一些小报仍在为她辩护。鲁珀特·默多克旗下的《太阳报》报道王妃时一般采用友好的姿态，该报在头版写道：“放过凯特吧。”它还写道：“攻击编辑过的照片是荒谬的”。

The risk for the royal family, experts said, is that Catherine’s manipulation of the photo will cast doubt over other news and images released by them, depriving the royals of a useful channel to reach younger people. Some tabloids were openly skeptical of her. “How did Kate Photo Become a PR Disaster?” asked The Daily Mail. “Kate’s Photo Bomb!” declared the tabloid, Metro.
专家表示，王室面临的风险是，凯瑟琳对这张照片的修改会让他们发布的其他新闻和图片受到质疑，从而令王室失去接触年轻人的一个有用渠道。一些小报公开对她表示怀疑。“凯特的照片是如何成为公关灾难的？”《每日邮报》发问。“凯特的照片炸弹！”小报《Metro》宣称。

“Social media should be a win-win for the royals, a means of disseminating their message unchallenged and undiluted,” Mr. Hunt said. “While most will probably forgive and forget, the risk is an erosion of trust, an important commodity for the monarchy.”
“社交媒体对王室来说应该是双赢的，它是一种手段，可以在不受质疑、不被篡改的情况下传播他们的信息，”亨特说。“虽然大多数人可能会原谅并忘记这件事，但风险是信任受到侵蚀，而信任对君主政体来说是非常重要的。”

The royal family’s credibility may not be the only casualty. Professor Nielsen noted that, in a recent survey, 69 percent of people in Britain said they were concerned about what was real and what was fake on the internet. And that was before the whirling vortex of rumors and misinformation about Catherine.
王室的信誉可能不是唯一的牺牲品。尼尔森指出，在最近的一项调查中，69%的英国人表示，他们对互联网上的真假难辨表示担忧。这是在关于凯瑟琳的谣言和不实信息的漩涡之前。

“This may well further intensify people’s skepticism toward much of what they see, both from news media and on social media,” he said. “Not a great few days for people’s confidence in the information environment.”
“这很可能会进一步加剧人们对他们从新闻媒体和社交媒体上看到的许多内容的怀疑，”他说。“这几天的事让人们对信息环境更没信心了。”

Mark Landler是时报伦敦分社社长，报道英国新闻以及美国在欧洲、亚洲和中东的外交政策。他从事新闻工作已超过30年。

翻译：晋其角