Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Join in COC’s Efforts to Create Safer Online World
Color Of Change report
If you are among the 28 million households that have watched “Harry & Meghan,” the riveting Netflix docuseries about Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, and the overt racism they have endured from the British media, the royal family and social media, then you caught a glimpse of Color of Change President Rashad Robinson and heard from COC Board Member Safiya Noble.
In Episode 5, Robinson is shown with Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, and two others on a high-powered Zoom panel called “The Internet Lie Machine.” Panelists spoke about the impact disinformation spread on the internet and social media has on communities, democracies and people.
The former royals speak candidly about the harm and stress they have suffered because of the vile, racist messages aimed at them — and spread about them — on Twitter and other social media platforms. Ms. Markle wept describing the death threats that she received on Twitter, messages that still make her fear for her life and that of her children.
“It’s important for people to understand when you plant a seed that is so hateful, what it can grow into,” Ms. Markle said.
The couple’s experience magnifies issues Color Of Change has raised in its work around tech accountability. COC’s latest campaign, the Black Tech Agenda and Scorecard, calls on Congress to rein in the outsized power of Big Tech to curb the growing dangers of hate speech, racism and discrimination on the internet.
When Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter in October 2022 and dismantled many of the social media platform’s internal user safeguards, hate speech on the site grew by 500% within the first 12 hours, according to media reports. Robinson points out that the royal couple partnered in 2020 with Color Of Change on the Stop Hate for Profit campaign, leveraging their relationships with major brands to get them to stop advertising on Facebook because of its long history of allowing racist, violent, antisemitic and verifiably false content to run rampant on its platform.
Unchecked racist and hateful rhetoric circulated on Twitter and other platforms has helped spur violence across our communities, experts say. They point to the bloody Jan. 6 insurrection in the U.S. Capitol and mass shootings around the country targeting Black and Latinx people, Asian-Americans, the LGBTQ community and other marginalized groups.
Self-regulated companies are unregulated companies, Robinson has said. Unaccountable tech giants consistently have chosen revenue over the safety and privacy of their users. That must end, he has said.
COC’s Black Tech Agenda, unveiled in September, creates a policy road map for lawmakers in Washington that centers racial justice and protects Black people from harm online. Recommendations include addressing disinformation and misinformation, reducing monopoly power, protecting privacy and ending online surveillance.
Last year, the Archewell Foundation, co-founded by Prince Harry and Ms. Markle, funded organizations that they said have taken the lead in creating a better and safer world online. Those organizations include Color Of Change and the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, which Noble co-founded and serves as co-director.
With Robinson as chair, Prince Harry and Noble also serve on the Aspen Institute Commission on Information Disorder that released its own recommendations for combating misinformation in technology, media and social media.
In the Netflix series, Prince Harry called the glut of misinformation on Twitter and other media platforms “a global humanitarian crisis.”
“We know a small group of accounts are allowed to create a huge amount of chaos online without any consequences whatsoever,” he said.
Christopher Bouzy, CEO of Bot Sentinel Inc. that specializes in analyzing disinformation and targeted social media attacks, said his firm’s analysis of 114,000 tweets posted about Prince Harry and Ms. Markle found that 70 percent of the hateful content came from just 83 accounts but reached 17 million people.
But it was not “your everyday trolling,” Bouzy said. Instead, he said, it was a small group of white women “creating constant attacks” against Ms. Markle.
Noble, a nationally recognized expert on issues of algorithmic discrimination and technology bias, sought to define the harmful impact and repercussions of such “highly coordinated and deeply networked” propaganda attacks on the couple.
“It’s like symbolic annihilation,” Noble said in the docuseries. “If you can destroy people who are symbols of social justice, then you can scare people to not want to be public as a way to signal to the rest of us to stand down.”