The Duke and the Duchess of Sussex call for stronger protections for children of social media dangers, saying that “enough is not done”.
Prince Harry and Meghan have unveiled a memorial in New York which is dedicated to the memory of children whose families believe that online harmful equipment has contributed to their death.
“We want to make sure that things are changed so that no more children were lost in social media,” Prince Harry told BBC Breakfast in New York.
“Life is better on social networks,” he said, adding that it was “grateful” that his children and Meghan are still too young to be online.
“The easiest thing to say is to keep your children far from social media. The sad reality is that children who are not on social networks are normally intimidated in school because they cannot be part of the same conversation as everyone,” Prince Harry told journalists during an Archwell Foundation event in New York.
The installation unveiled by Prince Harry and Meghan is called The Lost Screen Memorial, and is made from 50 smartphones, each displaying the screen photo of a child whose life was lost “due to social media damage”. It will be open for 24 hours.
The images of the children were shared by parents who are part of the parents’ network, set up by the Archewell Foundation of Prince Harry and Meghan. It is a network of support for parents whose children have undergone social media damage.
Prince Harry and Meghan supported families who say that social media played a role in the death of their children.
They supported calls in technological companies that parents should be able to access information on the phones of deceased children, despite arguments on privacy.
The prince said that technological companies “got away” by arguing that they did not need to disclose information to British families due to confidentiality considerations.
“You tell a parent to a parent, you tell a father and a mother that he cannot have the details of what their child was doing on social networks because of their child’s intimacy. It is bad,” said the prince.
Meghan said the danger of social media was a global problem and that “one thing we can all agree is that children should be safe.”
She congratulated the parents who were expressed.
“I think that in many ways, what we see through these parents is the hope and the promise of something better, because … they just want to make sure that it does not happen to anyone else,” said Meghan.
“We are simply grateful that our children are too young to be on social networks at this stage,” said Prince Harry.
She thinks that her 14 -year -old son, Jools, died after an online challenge went wrong in 2022 and his social media accounts could provide the necessary evidence. An investigation into his death revealed that he had committed suicide.
She was part of a group of British parents who took their own measures, separated from the Archewell Foundation, to organize a demonstration outside the Meta offices on Thursday.
Earlier in the week, she told BBC Breakfast: “It is too late for our son Jools, but there are many other children in the world that we still have to help. This is a massive problem in the world.
“There was nothing that gave us an indication that there was a problem,” said Ellen, who now wants to warn other parents than “you don’t know what your children are watching”.
Meta, who owns Facebook and Instagram, said that she shares the goal of keeping teenagers online. The firm said it recently introduced “adolescent accounts” with improved protections.
“We believe that adolescents deserve coherent protections on all the different applications they use – not just our platforms,” Meta said in a statement.
On Thursday, in the United Kingdom on Thursday, the media regulator ofcom published measures intended to improve protections for online children, including requiring more strict age controls and more robust measures to prevent children from accessing harmful content.
