Did Prince William ascend to the British throne following the death of his father King Charles III and expel Queen Camilla from the royal family? No, that's not true: There is no news of King Charles' passing at the time of writing, and the royals' website shows that William remains Prince of Wales on November 18, 2024. The site where the story appeared calls itself ABCNEWS, but is actually a blog that has nothing to do with the American broadcaster of the same name.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Facebook on November 11, 2024. Its caption read:
Breaking: William Ascends to the Throne, Immediately Expels Camilla from the Royal Family: 'You Are... Full details below
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Sun Nov 17 00:47:24 2024 UTC)
Lead Stories conducted a Google search (archived here) and found nothing to confirm the claim about Prince William's investiture as Britain's monarch. The royal family's website (archived here) lists Charles III as king, Camilla as queen and William as Prince of Wales.
The first comment on the Facebook post offers a link to the story with the "full details" referenced in the caption. It appears on a site that calls itself ABCNEWS (archived here), and uses a logo that appears close to identical to that of the U.S. American Broadcasting Company in its URL field:
(Source: ABCNEWS screenshot taken on Sun Nov 17 01:21:54 2024 UTC)
The site has nothing to do with the ABC News broadcaster. The web address includes the word "chainityai," which the real ABC's address does not. Lead Stories searched domaintools.com for "abcnews.chainityai.com" and found that ChaiNiTyAi.com was created by NameCheap, Inc. (archived here), a domain-name registrar, on March 31, 2023, with an internet-protocol location in San Jose, California.
(Source: Domaintools.com screenshot taken on Sun Nov 17 02:04:06 2024 UTC)
Abcnews.chainityai.com is a blog that features fake news stories about the British royals. Lead Stories ran the article about Prince William through Hive Moderation's artificial intelligence (AI) detection tool, which found that it was 99.9 percent "likely to contain AI Generated Text."
(Source: HiveModeration screenshot taken on Sun Nov 17 00:55:31 2024 UTC)
The Facebook profile where the claim appeared bears the name "The Prince of Wales," but does not have the blue check mark Facebook uses to verify famous people. The account's "page transparency" section (archived here) reveals that it was created on October 2, 2024, and its managers are in Vietnam.
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Sun Nov 17 00:30:09 2024 UTC)
Additional Lead Stories fact checks on claims concerning the British royal family can be found here.
