Prince Harry and Meghan denounce the harmful effects of social media on today’s youth

Guests sipped prosecco and chatted while dessert was served at the third annual Project Health Minds gala Thursday evening in New York City.

The evening was coming to an end, but there was still one big award to be given: Humanitarian of the Year, which this year would honor Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, for creating the Parents’ Network through their non-profit Archewell Foundation. The Parents Network supports families who have been harmed by social media.

Earlier this year, he organized an event in which the faces of young children were shown on giant smartphone screens; the children had lost their lives in a way that their parents believed social media had contributed to.

Thursday’s gala was hosted by the nonprofit Project Healthy Minds, which provides free access to mental health services, focusing particularly on young people struggling in a world dominated by technology. The event, along with the conference the following day, explored how young people and their parents view social media and revealed the serious impact these platforms have had on mental health.

“Let me share a number with you,” Prince Harry said as he and his wife took the stage to accept the award. “Four thousand. That’s the number of families the Social Media Victims Law Center currently represents.”

This figure only represents parents who were able to connect their child’s harm to social media and who have the ability to “fight back against some of the richest and most powerful companies in the world”, Prince Harry said.

“We have witnessed the explosion of unregulated artificial intelligence, heard more and more stories of heartbroken families, and seen parents around the world become increasingly concerned about their children’s digital lives,” he continued.

He said these families faced corporations and lobbyists who spent millions to cover up the truth; that algorithms were designed to “maximize data collection at all costs” and that social media was preying on children.

Then he criticized Apple for its violations of user privacy and Meta for saying that privacy restrictions would cost them billions. He talked about the harms of AI and what happened when researchers, posing as children, tested an increasingly popular AI chatbot. “They were experiencing a harmful interaction every five minutes,” he said.

“This was not content created by a third party,” he continued. “These were the company’s own chatbots working to advance their own depraved internal policies.”

The big announcement of the evening was that The Parents Network would partner with ParentsTogether, another organization focused on family advocacy and online safety, to do more work to protect children from social media.

This is not the first time that Prince Harry, in particular, has spoken out against the harms of social media. Last April, the prince visited young leaders in Brooklyn to speak to them about the growing influence of tech platforms, which have been driven by profit rather than security. In January, he and Meghan also called out Meta for undermining free speech after the platform announced it would make changes to its fact-checking policy.

The couple’s thoughts on the influence of tech companies don’t exist in isolation.

Numerous studies have shown the negative impact of social media on young people, creating a mental health crisis and fueling an epidemic of loneliness. The next day, Friday, World Mental Health Day, the Healthy Minds Project organized a mental health festival. For a few of these panels, Project Health Minds partnered with Prince Harry and Meghan’s Archewell Foundation to speak with parents, advocates and experts about how social media has rewritten and rewritten childhood.

After the Gala, there was a mental health festival

The first panel, simply titled “How are young people doing in the digital age” was presented by Harry.

One panelist, Katie, explained how, when she was just 12, TikTok was filling her For You page with videos about dieting and weight loss; Katie eventually developed an eating disorder.

Another panelist was Isabel Sunderland, policy manager at the organization Design It For Us, which campaigns for safer social media.

She remembers one day coming across an article about the Myanmar genocide, which Meta’s Facebook platform was later accused of contributing to. The article took her down a rabbit hole as she sought to understand how the platforms she uses every day could be used as tools fomenting “hate and violence.” She always felt it was her fault if she encountered content regarding harmful topics like eating disorders.

“What I discovered through this research is that in fact, these social networks are designed by social media companies to increase addiction and time spent on their platforms,” she said.

The next panel, focused on childhood, discussed in more detail the harm that social media causes to children. It was presented by Meghan and moderated by journalist Katie Couric.

It all started with Jonathan Haidt, the author of the bestselling and controversial book “The Anxious Generation,” presenting his findings.

Anxiety is on the rise. Depression is on the rise. Children have difficulty at school. More and more children find that their lives have no meaning. There is no more outside playtime. They don’t learn social cues because they don’t go out. Boys are led down the path of gaming addiction. Young people do not know how to deal with conflicts in real life, because they do not spend time in real life, but only online.

And while states have tried to pass laws, it hasn’t come without challenges: The tech lobby is hard at work.

“Gaming is about brain development,” Haidt told Couric during the panel. “When animals are deprived of play in early childhood, they emerge much more anxious as adults.”

There’s even a reduction in actual boredom time – those moments spent staring out the window during a car ride or staring aimlessly ahead while waiting in line. These moments gave the brain time to rest and have now been replaced by scrolling on tablets and smartphones.

Amy Neville, Community Manager of the Parents’ Network and Chair of the Alexander Neville Foundation, joined the panel. She lost her son, Alexander, to an overdose and is suing Snapchat for giving drug dealers access to her son.

“I quickly realized that families all over the United States were waking up to find their children dead in their bedroom from pills purchased on Snapchat,” she said. His trial is moving forward. “I feel like it’s a fight to the death,” she said. “I’m ready to go.”

Another mother, Kirsten, took the stage. She is the mother of young girl Katie, who was on the previous panel. She explained that she thought she was doing everything right: checking her daughter’s phone every night and putting it away before she went to sleep. Katie still ended up in the hospital with an eating disorder.

Kirsten looked through the text messages and search history. Then someone sent her an article about how TikTok is spreading content about young girls’ eating disorders.

“My husband and I didn’t know about the For You page,” she said. “It wasn’t the content my daughter was looking for, but rather content that kept coming back to her. »

The consensus of this panel – as at both events – was more action.

Throughout the event, people called for more legislative action, more accountability from tech platforms, more speaking out, and more people coming together to establish boundaries between themselves and social media. Even though evil is said to fill the presence, hope remains around the corner.

“We can and we will build the movement that all families and all children deserve,” Meghan said at the gala. “We know that when parents come together, when communities come together, waves are made. We’ve seen it happen and we see it growing.”