Kensington Palace Staff Reportedly Spends ‘A Lot of Hours’ Monitoring Online Threats Against Meghan and Kate

Trouble in palace paradise! Staffers at Kensington Palace have reportedly been spending lots of time managing negative comments being said online about Duchesses Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle. “The Palace has always monitored comments, but it’s a hugely time-consuming thing,” an insider recently told Hello! magazine. “They can block certain words, but some of it is quite serious.”

According to the source, “A lot of hours are being spent reviewing old material and moderating comments under posts.” And, supposedly, “there were two or three that were violent threats” among hundreds of thousands of comments posted online about Kate, 37, and Meghan, also 37, in the last year. “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,” the insider revealed.

While Kate has never had (that we know of) personal social media accounts, Meg bid farewell to both her Instagram and Twitter accounts ahead of her May 2018 royal wedding to Prince Harry. However, fans are still able to keep up with the royals through Kensington Palace’s official social media and because of that, some people get into really heated arguments about Kate, Meghan, and their husbands, Prince William and Harry, respectively, online.

“It follows a Kate vs Meghan narrative and some of the worst stuff is between Kate fans and Meghan fans,” the source dished. “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!‘s royal reporter Emily Nash added that most of the comments are particularly aimed at Meg and Kate and not such much Harry, 34, and William, 36. “It seems to me to be particularly sexist,” the royal expert recently told CNN. “You have people comparing them in a way that doesn’t really happen with men — ‘she’s walking funny, or her heels are too high, or her legs are too skinny.'”

Criticisms of Meghan specifically have been publicly addressed by members of the monarchy before. Shortly after Harry and his pregnant wife made their relationship public in 2016, Kensington Palace made a rare statement slamming the racist and sexist comments being directed towards the former Suits actress.

“His girlfriend, Meghan Markle, has been subject to a wave of abuse and harassment,” the statement said. “Some of this has been very public — the smear on the front page of a national newspaper, the racial undertones of comment pieces; and the outright sexism and racism of social media trolls and web article comments.”

The statement continued, “It is not right that a few months into a relationship with him that Ms. Markle should be subjected to such a storm. He knows commentators will say this is ‘the price she has to pay’ and that ‘this is all part of the game.’ He strongly disagrees. This is not a game — it is her life and his.” With Meg and Harry’s first baby expected to arrive in just a few short months, we really hope the negative comments about the mama-to-be and her sister-in-law Kate die down just in time.

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