Last year, The Sun featured blanket coverage of the assault allegations against Flack, even calling her “Caroline Whack.”

The rancor around Flack’s suicide is only the latest time British tabloids have come under scrutiny. It comes just weeks after Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, who have complained repeatedly about press intrusion into their lives, again threatened legal action against several British tabloids over invasive photos.

But media commentators said they did not think calls for #carolineslaw would be any more successful than past campaigns to strengthen privacy laws in Britain. Nor did they expect the campaign to dent the British public’s interest in such stories, which tend to be popular on social media.

“This is one of those great hypocrisies of the British public, that they indulge in reading, and often writing, about these celebrities and then when things go wrong, they turn on the media and say it’s all the media’s fault,” Roy Greenslade, a media columnist for The Guardian, said in a telephone interview. Greenslade once worked at The Sun and was also editor of The Daily Mirror, another tabloid.

Greenslade said he lived half of every year in Ireland and there seemed “less of an appetite” there to read about celebrity gossip. That was also the case in other European countries like France and Norway, he said. Gossip rags do exist elsewhere, he said — he cited the National Enquirer as one example — but they are not seen as also being serious newspapers like Britain’s tabloids.

Adrian Bingham, a historian who has written a history of Britain’s tabloid press, said in a telephone interview that British newspapers’ focus on people’s private lives first boomed in the 1930s as the publications competed for scoops. “People would have done anything then,” he said. “If they could have hacked phones in the 1930s, they would have.”