Prince Harry and Meghan warn of social media dangers for youth.
In a New York ballroom shimmering with the kind of manufactured glamour that defines modern celebrity, Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, stepped onto a stage that felt a world away from the gilded cages of their former royal lives. They were there not to be fêted, but to sound an alarm, one that cuts to the very heart of our digitally saturated existence: the profound, and often unacknowledged, dangers social media poses to our youth.Listening to them speak, I was struck not by the political weight of their titles, but by the raw, human vulnerability underpinning their message. This wasn't a dry policy lecture; it was a plea from parents, from individuals who have themselves been chewed up and spat out by the relentless, often toxic, machinery of online attention.They spoke of a digital ecosystem engineered not for connection, but for compulsion, where algorithms meticulously curate rabbit holes of comparison and discontent for young minds still forming their sense of self. It’s a landscape I’ve heard echoed in countless conversations with teenagers in my own community—the girl who confessed she deleted Instagram for a month because the constant scroll of seemingly perfect lives made her feel, in her words, 'invisible and wrong,' or the boy who described the simmering anxiety of crafting the perfect, witty reply in a group chat, terrified of the social fallout of a misstep.Harry and Meghan are giving voice to a silent, collective anxiety felt in households everywhere, a parental dread that the very devices we hand our children to keep them safe and connected are, in fact, opening trapdoors to unprecedented psychological harm. They framed it not as a Luddite rejection of technology, but as a urgent call for a fundamental rewiring of our digital world, demanding accountability from the trillion-dollar corporations that have, thus far, operated with near-total impunity, treating our children’s mental health as a mere externality in the relentless pursuit of engagement and profit.Their presence at this gala, using their immense platform to amplify this cause, is a fascinating pivot, a conscious move from royal figureheads to global advocates for human-centric progress. It raises a critical question for all of us: in an age where a teenager’s sense of worth can be so profoundly shaped by likes, shares, and the curated perfection of influencers, what kind of world are we building for them? The answer, as Harry and Meghan so compellingly argued, requires us to look beyond the screen's seductive glow and confront the very real human cost of our connected age.
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