Crown, Clicks and Combat

How Royal Fandom Became a Digital Battlefield

I’ve written Crown, Clicks and Combat because the battles over monarchy aren’t confined to palaces or tabloids anymore. They’re fought in timelines, hashtags, and comment threads.

What began as royal “fandom” has mutated into a digital war zone. On one side, monarchist trolls, often coordinated, sometimes anonymous, deploy smears, racist dog‑whistles, and endless outrage to defend the Crown’s image. On the other, communities of readers, researchers, and ordinary supporters push back with receipts, fact‑checks, and solidarity.

This book is my attempt to map that battlefield. 

Extract

The thing about misinformation is that it rarely arrives wearing a villain’s cape. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t say, “Hello, I’m here to destabilise your sense of reality.” 

Misinformation sidles in quietly, disguised as curiosity, concern, or “just asking questions.” And once it’s in, it multiplies. It spreads. It becomes the background hum of a culture that can no longer tell the difference between fact, feeling, and fantasy.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the digital ecosystem built around Meghan Sussex. A woman who, by any reasonable measure, should have been the monarchy’s easiest PR win in decades. Instead, she became the centre of a misinformation machine so relentless, so emotionally charged, and so culturally revealing that it tells us far more about Britain than it ever will about her.

The mechanics of this machine are simple, but the cultural forces powering it are centuries old.

A false claim appears, often from a YouTube grifter broadcasting from a spare bedroom decorated with Union Jack bunting and a ring light. These creators are not journalists (not even the really terrible kind of British tabloid journalists). They are entrepreneurs of outrage. 

Their business model is simple: monetise resentment. They produce videos with thumbnails that look like a tabloid headline having a panic attack. Red arrows, blurry screenshots, and titles like MEGHAN CAUGHT OUT AGAIN or THE LIE EXPOSED. The content is pretty much irrelevant. The emotional trigger is everything.

The algorithm sees engagement, the clicks, the comments, the fury, and pushes it further. Suddenly, the video is everywhere. People who would never willingly watch a 40‑minute rant from someone who says “mark my words” every five minutes find it in their recommendations. The algorithm doesn’t care about truth. It cares about heat.

Then the tabloids pick up the scent. Not the claim itself – that would be too obvious – but the energy of it. They run a story with a headline phrased as a question, because questions are legally safer than statements and far more effective at planting ideas. Is Meghan…? Could Meghan…? Why Meghan Might… The article is usually thin, padded with anonymous sources and speculation, but the headline does the work. It lodges in the mind. It becomes part of the cultural wallpaper.

And then the coordinated accounts, the swarm, descend. They repeat the claim, twist it, exaggerate it, and attach it to whatever else they’re angry about that day. They reply to journalists, celebrities, random strangers, anyone who dares to say something vaguely positive, or even neutral, about Meghan. They flood hashtags. They hijack conversations. They create the illusion of consensus.

This is how misinformation spreads: not through a single lie, but through a network of repetition. 

A YouTube rant becomes a tabloid whisper becomes a Twitter dogpile becomes a “common belief.” And once something becomes a “common belief,” people stop asking where it came from. They just assume it must be true because they’ve heard it so many times.

Carole Malone’s on‑air false claim about Doria Ragland was one of those moments that crystallised the entire problem with the British media’s treatment of Meghan and her mother. It wasn’t just the lie itself, though that was bad enough. It was the ease with which it was delivered, the confidence with which it was stated, and the speed with which it spread before anyone had a chance to breathe.

Malone didn’t hedge. She didn’t say, “There are unverified reports.” She stated the falsehood as fact, live, on national television, about a Black woman who has been relentlessly targeted by racist narratives since the moment her daughter entered the royal orbit. And then, when the backlash arrived, Malone was forced to apologise live on air. Forced being the operative word. It was the kind of apology that happens when lawyers get involved, not when conscience does.

And then GB News quietly removed the apology from its website within 24 hours.

That detail matters. It tells you everything you need to know about whether the apology was genuine. If a broadcaster truly believes in correcting misinformation, the correction stays up. It becomes part of the record. It signals accountability. Removing it suggests the opposite, that the apology was a procedural inconvenience, a regulatory requirement, not a moral reckoning. A box ticked, not a lesson learned.

The whole episode raises an obvious question: is it really credible that an experienced journalist like Carole Malone, someone who has been in the industry for donkeys’ years, someone who once told Princess Diana to “clam up” as though she were scolding a teenager, wouldn’t have checked primary sources before repeating a damaging claim about a private citizen?

Journalists are trained to verify. They know the difference between rumour and fact. They know the consequences of getting it wrong. Malone is not a rookie. She is not unfamiliar with media ethics. She is not unaware of the scrutiny surrounding Meghan and her mother. And yet she repeated a falsehood that could have been debunked with a 30‑second Google search.

So the question becomes: was this a mistake, or was it something else?

When misinformation targets Black women, especially Black mothers, it doesn’t arrive in a vacuum. It draws on centuries‑old tropes: the irresponsible mother, the criminalised Black body, the idea that Black women are inherently suspect. These narratives are so deeply embedded in British and American culture that they can be activated without conscious intent. They feel “plausible” to people who have never interrogated the racial scripts they’ve inherited.

Malone didn’t invent the lie. But she amplified it. She gave it legitimacy. She placed it into the bloodstream of a media ecosystem already primed to believe the worst about Meghan and her family. And that is the real danger: misinformation doesn’t need malice to spread. It just needs someone with a platform who doesn’t bother to check. Who doesn’t care.

The speed with which the lie travelled … and the speed with which the apology disappeared … reveals the deeper truth. This wasn’t just a slip‑up. It was a symptom of a media culture that treats Meghan and Doria as acceptable targets, that sees Black women as fair game, and that prioritises outrage over accuracy.

And it shows how the so‑called “culture wars” function in practice. The lie wasn’t just misinformation; it was ammunition. It fed a narrative. It reinforced a worldview. It gave the anti‑Meghan ecosystem something to chew on. The apology, by contrast, served no such purpose. So it vanished.

In the end, the Malone incident is not about one presenter or one mistake. 

It is about a system that rewards sensationalism, punishes nuance, and treats Black women’s lives and reputations as collateral damage. It is about a broadcaster that wants the performance of accountability without the substance. And it is about a public that is increasingly aware of the gap between what the media says and what the media does.

The lie travelled far. The apology barely made it out the door.

And that tells you everything.

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Crown, Clicks and Combat is available now as a PDF through my Buy Me a Coffee shop. Every purchase helps me keep producing independent, evidence‑based books and articles that challenge establishment narratives.