By Rebekah Anne

The Queen of England has passed and social media is in an array over it. This is the first time in almost everyone’s life experiencing a monarch of this magnitude passing away. I think most people can all agree that the British royal family is the primary royal family we as a whole world pay the most attention to. 

The royal family is one of the most interesting public figure sets in the world. We know just enough to feel close and want more information, but we know nothing about them in reality. We got to learn about the interworkings of Princess Dina and the now King Charles’s marriage but in the reality, we knew so little about the situation. 

The monarchy is something that is changing second by second now, the UK now has a King for the first time in 70 years and has a head of state who has waited in line for 70 years to become king
(he was 3 when his mother QEII took became head of state). No one in their wildest dreams would have thought Queen Elizabeth II would live to 96 years old. 

So now to the good stuff… how has the Queen’s death taken over social media? The simple answer is, that any current moment in history is an easy way to make good content because that is what a lot of people want to see at that moment. The long answer is, that the Queen’s death gave an outlet to people who are already made content about the family such as TikToker @Matta_of_fact who has gained many followers over these last two weeks and now has 1.1M followers on the platform. She had been making content on the family for over 2 years and had some traction but this event allowed her to grow that following because all of a sudden a newfound interest in the family was coming to light. There is also another TikToker who already had a large following of 2.5M who is just a British guy @max_balegde who makes snarky satire videos about all topics but has really made some funny videos about the Queen. And frankly, I think the interest is less about the Queen and more about the new monarchy and whole family at hand, and what it will look like with King Charles as the head of state. Commentary on Megan and Harry is resurfacing, and even the arguably biggest modern-day royal scandal of Charles and Dina is very evident on the app. The hashtag “Queen” has over 41.6B uses and while yes there are videos using the hashtag not related to this situation it is been overflowing with use since she has passed to gain any video traction. People who knew nothing or very little about the family likely now at least know something more than they did before, I for one definitely know far more about them than I did two weeks ago. 

So all in all the hype over the death of HRH is on all spectrums. It’s as if her passing was the door opening to creating a larger pool of royal commentary. While royalists have always been a niche, it has been one of the smaller niches, and now it is grown in size dramatically, I cannot open any of my social media accounts without seeing a least one post, video, or comment on either the Queen or the royal family and that shows how this event has taken over social media.