Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, were honored as Humanitarians of the Year at the Project Healthy Minds Gala on Thursday for founding The Parents Network under their Archewell Foundation. This initiative supports families who have been severely impacted by social media platforms, including those whose children have lost their lives due to online harms. The Gala and the follow-up conference on World Mental Health Day focused on the grave effects of unregulated technology on young people.
Corporate Greed vs. Family Safety
Accepting the award, Prince Harry immediately highlighted the immense scale of the crisis: “Four thousand. That’s how many families the Social Media Victims Law Center is currently representing.” He noted that these families are up against the “wealthiest, most powerful corporations in the world” and lobbyists who spend millions to suppress the truth. The Prince accused algorithms of being designed to “maximize data collection at any cost” and prey upon children. He singled out both Apple for privacy violations and Meta for citing billions in potential costs from privacy restrictions.
Prince Harry also addressed the dangers of AI, citing a study where researchers posing as children interacted with a popular AI chatbot and experienced “a harmful interaction every five minutes,” which he condemned as the company’s “own chatbots working to advance their own depraved internal policies.” The couple announced a major new collaboration, partnering The Parents Network with ParentsTogether, a family advocacy organization focused on online safety. Meghan concluded the Gala with a message of hope, stating, “We know that when parents come together, when communities unite, waves are made.”
Expert Testimony on Childhood Harm
The subsequent festival featured expert panels that further detailed the harm being done. Jonathan Haidt, author of the book The Anxious Generation, presented findings linking the rise of the smartphone-based childhood to surging anxiety, depression, and a lack of social skills in children who are missing out on vital outside play. Haidt emphasized that the loss of unsupervised “play is about brain development.”
The panels featured emotional testimony from impacted parents, including a mother whose 12-year-old daughter, Katie, developed an eating disorder after the TikTok algorithm repeatedly filled her “For You” page with dieting videos—content she was not seeking. Another mother, Amy Neville, who is currently suing Snapchat for allegedly allowing drug dealers to access her late son, Alexander, spoke of the fight for accountability, calling it a “fight to the death” that she is willing to see through. Panelist Isabel Sunderland, a policy advocate, confirmed that social media is designed to increase addiction and time spent on the platforms. The events concluded with unified calls for increased legislative action, greater tech platform accountability, and a collective effort to establish firm digital boundaries.
Author’s Opinion
Mosseri is correctly identifying that the most critical defense against the proliferation of convincing AI-generated content is not technology—which is easily defeated—but fundamental digital literacy and human skepticism. By placing the onus on parents and society to teach children to actively question the source and incentives behind every piece of online content, he is advocating for a profound, and necessary, cultural shift. The platform’s attempt to use crowdsourced fact-checking for AI labeling is a practical recognition that human consensus, however messy, is the only sustainable guardrail against a technology that is designed to make objective truth seamless and cheap to produce.
Featured image credit: Heute
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