Earlier this month, Meghan Markle made her return to Instagram after she and husband Prince Harry took a social media break that lasted nearly five years. She rejoined with a video filmed on a southern California beach, signaling that she thought progress had been made combatting the sorts of online abuse she and Harry have spent years raising alarms about. At the time, a source familiar with the duchess's thinking told Vanity Fair that she had met with executives at Meta to discuss making a healthier online ecosystem.
But last week, Meta’s recently MAGA-fied CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a suite of changes to their policies on misinformation and hate speech, including a dismantling of their nine-year-old fact-checking program.
On Sunday, Meghan and Harry’s Archewell Foundation released a statement decrying the announced changes to fact-checking. “It doesn’t matter whether your views are left, right or somewhere in between—the latest news from Meta about changes to their policies directly undermines free speech,” it read. “Contrary to the company’s talking points, allowing more abuse and normalizing hate speech serves to silence speech and expression, not foster it.”
Ever since leaving their roles as working royals in 2020, Meghan and Harry have been working to address the harms of social media, and that summer, they joined a Color of Change campaign to pressure Facebook to change its policies around hate speech. In August 2024, they announced the Archewell Parents’ Network, an online support group for those who have lost children to harms encountered online.
Meghan and Harry’s experiences with these campaigns are mentioned in the statement about Meta’s changes. “These decisions echo what experts, whistleblowers, and families have raised in hearings on online harm, especially regarding children’s safety: platform design, dictated by internal policies, directly determines our online experience,” it continued. “Having worked in this space for the last five years and witnessing the real-world devastation these decisions have, we feel there is no justification for why this industry behaves as if they are exempt from the ethical and moral standards everyone else abides by.”
Even as their work has led them to criticize Big Tech in no uncertain terms, the couple has emphasized that their work is about improving safety on social media, not rejecting it entirely. In October, Meghan visited with a Girls, Inc. chapter in Greater Santa Barbara to watch a group of teenagers participate in Social Media U, an Archewell-funded curriculum that encourages children to form healthier relationships to their devices.
English (US) ·