Harry and Meghan call for stronger social media protections for children

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are calling for stronger protections for children from the dangers of social media, saying “enough is not being done”.

Prince Harry and Meghan unveiled a memorial in New York City which is dedicated to the memory of children whose families believe harmful material online contributed to their deaths.

“We want to make sure that things are changed so that… no more kids are lost to social media,” Prince Harry told BBC Breakfast in New York.

“Life is better off social media,” he added, saying that he was “grateful” that his children were still too young to be online.

“The easiest thing to say is to keep your kids away from social media,” Prince Harry said at an Archewell Foundation event in New York.

“The sad reality is the kids who aren’t on social media normally get bullied at school because they can’t be part of the same conversation as everybody else.”

The installation unveiled by Prince Harry and Meghan is called the Lost Screen Memorial and is made of 50 enlarged smartphone screens, each displaying a photograph of a child whose life was lost “due to the harms of social media”. It will be open for 24 hours.

The children’s images were shared by parents who are part of the Parents’ Network. This is a support network, set up by Prince Harry and Meghan’s Archewell Foundation, for parents whose children have experienced harm from social media.

Prince Harry and Meghan have been supporting families who say social media played a role in the deaths of their children.

They have backed calls to technology firms that say parents should be able to gain access to information on the phones of children who have died, despite arguments about privacy.

The prince said tech firms were “getting away with it” by arguing they didn’t need to disclose information to UK families because of privacy considerations.

“You are telling a parent, you are telling a dad and a mum that they can’t have the details of what their kid was up to on social media because of the privacy of their kid. It’s wrong,” he said.

Meghan said the danger of social media was a global issue and “one thing we can all agree on is that children should be safe”.

She praised the parents who were speaking out.

“I think 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 this doesn’t happen to anyone else,” said Meghan.

Separately to Prince Harry and Meghan’s event in New York, a group of British parents staged a protest outside Meta’s offices on Thursday.

Ellen Roome, from Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, was among the families.

She believes her 14-year-old son Jools died after an online challenge went wrong in 2022. She says his social media accounts could provide evidence. An inquest into his death found he took his own life.

Earlier in the week, Ms Roome told BBC Breakfast: “It’s too late for our son Jools, but there are plenty of other children around the world that we still need to help. This is a massive issue globally.

“There was nothing that gave us any indication that there was a problem.”

Mark Kenevan, whose son Isaac died aged 13 in 2022, said: “All we’re asking is… please help us protect our children.”

A coroner ruled that Isaac died as a result of misadventure, but the Kenevans say social media platforms were also to blame.

Lisa Kenevan, Isaac’s mother, said the families banding together had given them strength.

“Our voices are getting stronger, and we’re not going to go away,” she said.

The Kenevans filed a wrongful death lawsuit against TikTok in the US earlier this year alongside three other British families.

The lawsuit accuses the platform of pushing dangerous prank and challenge videos to children to boost engagement time.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has said it shares the goal of keeping teens safe online. The firm said it had recently introduced “teen accounts” 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.

In the UK on Thursday, the media regulator Ofcom published measures intended to improve protections for children online, including requiring tougher age checks and more robust action to prevent children accessing harmful content.