The Duke and Duchess of Sussex made a big statement on their Sussex.com site yesterday, as verdicts came in from Los Angeles and New Mexico. Google (which owns YouTube) and Meta were found negligent and liable in what were bellwether cases about the harmful effects of social media addiction and technology. You can read the Sussexes’ full statement here – they say, in part, “After years of denial and deflection, a jury has confirmed what parents and experts have said all along: the harm isn’t in parenting, it’s in product design. The systems driving our social media platforms have been built to exploit, not protect, and accountability has finally arrived.” This has become one of Prince Harry’s biggest causes in particular, and last month, he met personally with some of the families suing these companies. He was in tears as he spoke about their losses and the pain these companies have caused.
Apparently, Google and Meta already plan to appeal and they’re already pushing statements about how the cases fundamentally misrepresent the causes for children’s anxiety, depression and social media addictions. Well, in Tom Sykes’ Royalist column, he took a swipe at Meghan:
Few parents, I suspect, won’t join with the Sussexes in congratulating the families and individuals who have forced the big social platforms of Meta and Google into a humiliating courtroom defeat today.
In a statement on their website the Sussexes said: “In a stunning and unanimous decision, the jury found that Meta and Google were negligent—and that their negligence directly caused harm to a young woman known as Kaley. Even more powerfully, the jury concluded that their actions were carried out with malice, oppression, or fraud.”
“These findings apply to both Instagram and Youtube. They validate the truth so many families have spoken for years—and prove, in a court of law, that the blame lies not with parents or children, but with platforms that engineered addiction and ignored warnings.”
I’ve said before that there is a yawning gap between Meghan’s enthusiastic embrace of social media and her attacks on its deleterious effects on children.
But today is not the day to go into that.
This is a common enough refrain from royalists and Meghan-haters. They want to argue that the Sussexes can’t have it both ways – they can’t blast social media companies for the real harm they cause while Meghan also has an Instagram account. The larger problem these “critics” have is that Meghan speaks with her own voice, and that she’s capable of ruining their weeks with one Instagram post. The critics’ goal is not “justice for victims” or “changing social media to make it more responsible” or “convincing EVERYONE to give up their social media accounts.” Their goal is silencing Meghan. That’s it. That’s what it’s always been about.
Photos courtesy of Meghan’s Instagram and As Ever’s Instagram.
SM is not going away so having a goal to make it safer and healthier makes sense.
“They want to argue that the Sussexes can’t have it both ways – they can’t blast social media companies for the real harm they cause while Meghan also has an Instagram account.”
Ummm, yes they can. They didn’t write the pernicious algorithm.
Last I checked Meghan and Harry aren’t hunting for minors to SA. That’s their Uncle Andrew.
“You can’t complain about drunk drivers when you have a car.” <- deranger logic
That’s exactly it — the algorithm that pushes dangerous garbage because that’s what gets engagement. I’m not sure many people actually understand that part?
Tom needs to take a good, hard look at his own toxic social media.
His substack says he has 64k subscribers, and no doubt most of them are haters and bots (at least it was going that way during the few weeks when it was free). But even bots have to buy a subscription, ya know? What a business model. 64k subscribers isn’t huge for social media, but it’s gotta mean he’s raking in the pounds for peddling hate.
Excellent take!
The problem is of course that they don’t like that her Instagram ruins their narratives, just like they find it petty when their spokesperson refutes nonsensical stories as being nonsensical, and deranged stalking by supposed historians as deranged. They long for the days of 2020 and 2021 when they barely said anything, and barely appeared in public and they could completely control the narrative of what their lives were like after leaving the BRF as working royals.
That being said though this argument still doesn’t make any sense. Pointing out that children should not have full access to social media as they are not capable yet of discerning and using good judgment about media usage, literacy, and being influenced by what they are seeing is not the same as saying that no one should have social media. There is a real documentable evidence that social media changes brain activity for children who are still growing and developing, and we still are just a generation in to seeing the long-term impact of those effects. We cannot deny that there is harm to children who are frequently on social media, whether that’s due to bullying, internalizing unrealistic expectations, or consuming mis -and disinformation.
I don’t think that my 14-year-old niece should be able to go and buy a fifth of vodka, but I enjoy a good dirty martini. Thinking that restrictions should be in place, until an individual can make an informed decision about usage does not make you a hypocrite.
Watching Harry be that little girl’s daddy is so precious. I just love their little family!
I love the photo of them on the boat. So sweet! 🥰
Haven’t the left behinds also taken up the cause of social media and mental health? Don’t they also have an Instagram account? Or is it only Meghan who isn’t allowed to have one?
If Meghan wasn’t campaigning for a safer social media, Sykes and co would still complain about her IG account as was the case in 2019.
You Tube is a depository of hate articles about Meghan. Every day dozens of hateful stories are posted. Is no one checking the content?
Tom Sucks, perpetual douche canoe. Children whose brains are still developing and maturing do not understand the harm perpetrated by the manipulative algorithms. Good thing a jury of adults recognized that fact even if Deranger Tom could not.
ALL media should be regulated. ALL media *was* regulated, before the internet. Silicon Valley has paid trillions of dollars to lobby Washington to essentially never regulate social media. But if the consumers and foreign nations (like Australia) can begin to force regulation on socials — by suing them and banning them for minors — then we are seeing the very first gains in the war for regulation of internet content/distribution. Regulation doesn’t mean we get rid of the entire genre of communication or even specific platforms, it means that “we” (whether consumer action or governments or both) require players to play by specific rules. Like: Don’t knowingly cause harm to children!!! All of this is to say that it’s okay for Meghan, a whole ass adult, to have an IG account. Her use is not what any regulation effort would target.