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

Guests sipped prosecco and chatted away while dessert was served at the third annual bash Healthy Minds Project Gala Thursday.

The evening was drawing to a close, but there was still a big award to be presented: the Humanitarian of the Year award, which this year will go to Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, for creating the Parents Network through the nonprofit Archewell Foundation. The Parents Network supports families affected by social media.

Earlier this year, it hosted an event in which the faces of young children were projected onto giant smartphone screens; children They lost their lives in ways Their parents believe social media contributed to this.

Thursday’s event was hosted by the nonprofit Project Healthy Minds, which provides free access to mental health services, with a special focus on young people struggling in a technology-dominated world. The event and conference held the following day took a look at how young people and their parents view social media, revealing just how seriously these platforms impact mental health.

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

He added that this number only represents parents who have been able to link harm to their children to social media and who have the power to “fight back against some of the richest and most powerful companies in the world.”

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

He said these families were up against corporations and lobbyists who were spending millions to suppress the truth. The algorithms were designed to “maximize data collection at all costs” and said social media was exploiting children.

He then criticized Apple for its violations of user privacy and Meta for saying privacy restrictions would cost it billions. He talked about the harms of artificial intelligence and what happened when researchers, posing as children, tested an increasingly popular AI chatbot. “They had an adverse reaction every five minutes,” he said.

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

The big announcement that night was that Parents Network would be teaming up with ParentsTogether, another organization focused on family advocacy and online safety, to do more work to protect kids from social media.

This is not the first time that Prince Harry, in particular, has spoken about the harms of social media. Back in April, Prince He visited youth leaders in Brooklyn To talk to them about the growing influence of technology platforms, which are motivated by profit, not safety. And in January, he and Meghan too Meta called for undermining freedom of expression After the platform announced that it would make changes to its fact-checking policy.

Their ideas about the influence of technology companies do not exist in isolation.

Numerous studies have shown the negative impact that social media is having on young people, creating a mental health crisis and fueling the loneliness epidemic. And the next day, Friday, is World Mental Health Day, the Healthy Minds ProjectHe gave a festival speaking about mental health. For a few of these panels, Project Health Minds teamed up with Prince Harry and Meghan’s Archewell Foundation to hold discussions with parents, advocates and experts about how social media is rewriting and rewriting childhood.

After the concert there was a festival about mental health

The first session was titled “How are young people in the digital age” and was presented by Harry.

One of the panelists, Katie, talked about how when she was just 12 years old, TikTok was filling her For You page with videos about dieting and losing weight; Katie eventually developed an eating disorder.

Another panelist was Isabelle Sunderland, policy officer at Design It For Us, which advocates for safer social media.

She recalls that one day she came across an article about the genocide in Myanmar, which Meta, Facebook, commented on. He was later charged with contributing. The article led her down a rabbit hole as she sought to understand how the platforms she uses every day could be used as tools to incite “hate and violence.” She always believed it was her fault that she encountered content related to harmful topics like eating disorders.

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

The next session, which focused on childhood, talked more about the harm that social media causes to children. It was presented by Meghan and moderated by journalist Katie Couric.

It started with Jonathan Haidt, best-selling author The controversial book“The Anxious Generation” presents its findings.

Concern is left behind. Depression arrives. Children struggle in school. More children find that their lives have no meaning. There is no longer time to play outside. They don’t learn social cues because they don’t go out. The boys are led down the path of gambling addiction. Young people don’t know how to deal with conflict in real life because they don’t spend time in real life – only online.

As states try to pass legislation, it hasn’t been without a fight – The tech lobby is working hard.

“Play is about brain development,” Haidt told Couric at the panel. “When animals are deprived of play in early childhood, they become more anxious in adulthood.”

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

Amy Neville, Parents Network Community Director and President of the Alexander Neville Foundation, joined the panel. She lost her son, Alexander, to an overdose and is suing Snapchat to provide access to drug dealers To her son.

“I quickly realized that families across the United States were waking up to find their children dead in their bedrooms due to pills purchased on Snapchat,” she said. Her lawsuit is moving forward. “I feel like it’s a fight to the death,” she said. “I’m ready to go there.”

Another mother, Kirsten, took the stage. She is the mother of the little girl, Katie, who sat in the previous painting. She spoke of how she believes she is doing everything right, checking her daughter’s phone every night and putting it away before she goes to sleep. However, Katie ended up in the hospital due to an eating disorder.

Kirsten scrolled through her text messages and search history. Then someone sent her an article about how to view TikTok Content of eating disorder in young girls.

“My husband and I, we didn’t know anything about the For You page,” she said. “This was not the satisfaction my daughter was looking for, but the satisfaction that came repeatedly.”

The consensus of that committee — as in both events — was more work.

Throughout the event, people called for more legislative action, more accountability from tech platforms, more speaking out, and more people coming together to set boundaries between themselves and social media. Although mischief is said to fill the audience, hope remains just around the corner.

“We can and will build the movement that all families and all children deserve,” Meghan said at the ceremony. “We know that when parents come together, when communities come together, it makes waves. We’ve seen it happen, and we’re watching it grow.”