Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, said “enough is not being done” about the harm social media can cause children, as he appeared at the unveiling of a memorial in New York City dedicated to young people he said have died because of it, CBS News partner network BBC News reported. Harry was attending the event with his wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.
“The easiest thing to say is to keep your kids away from social media” to protect them, Harry said.
The memorial, which will be open for 24 hours, is made up of 50 smartphones that each display an image of a child who organizers say lost their life because of social media, the BBC reported.
Prince Harry and Meghan have been supporting families that say social media played a role in the deaths of their children, and have backed calls for tech companies to share information from those children’s phones with parents.
“It is a universal truth that our children are in harms way by what’s happening online,” Meghan said. “I think for those who do choose to be online and to be on social media — as adults as well — that we get to set the example and really put as much good and joy into the world as we can.”
A number of families from the U.K. travelled to New York to request better protections for children from tech companies. Some of them took part in a separate protest outside Meta’s offices.
Among those families was Ellen Roome, the mother of a 14-year-old, Jools, who died in 2022. Roome believes it happened after an online challenge went wrong, and that his social media accounts could hold evidence, the BBC reported. An inquest found Jools died by suicide.
Meta said it had recently introduced special accounts for teens with enhanced protections. “We believe teens deserve consistent protections across all the different apps they use — not just our platforms,” Meta said in a statement to the BBC.
“We’re just grateful that our kids are too young to be on social media at this point,” Harry said Thursday. Harry and Meghan’s children, Archie and Lilibet, are 5 and 3.
“One of the reasons that we’re doing this is because us, collectively with all these parents, want to make sure that things are changed, right? So that no more parents and no more kids are lost to social media. It’s unacceptable. It’s wrong. It’s no longer a secret. And yet these companies are given this power to be able to conceal the truth from parents as to why their kid took their life,” Harry said.
