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.
