Meghan Markle’s Sweet Photo With Princess Lilibet Has Critics Pointing Out a Glaring Irony
Meghan Markle's photo of Princess Lilibet helping organize her closet has royal expert Tom Sykes worried about a very real danger.
Meghan Markle shared a sweet mommy-daughter moment with Princess Lilibet, recently posting a photo of her little girl helping organize a wardrobe of designer clothes. While it may seem harmless, royal expert Tom Sykes argued that the image was in poor taste, especially ahead of the Duchess's anti-social-media speech. He believes her stance against the harmful effects of social media on young people loses credibility when she continues to commercialize her daughter online, exposing Lilibet to the very same dangers she campaigns against.
In an article on his Substack, The Royalist, Sykes highlighted the seriousness of Markle's activism, which focuses on campaigning against exposure to self-harm content online. On May 17, the Duchess gave a powerful speech in Geneva for the inauguration of the 'Lost Screen Memorial,' a digital project launched by her and Prince Harry to honor children who ended their lives after being bullied on social media. Hours ahead of her address, he penned, "A woman who is about to stand alongside the world's most senior public health official and talk about the measurable and preventable harms of exposing children to social media has just — voluntarily, for no apparent reason other than self-promotion — exposed her own child to social media."
Arguing his case, the royal expert continued, "There is a version of reality in which Harry and Meghan could have been genuinely effective advocates for children's digital safety…But they have squandered every last drop of goodwill through precisely this kind of stunt — the performative solemnity undercut by the reflexive vanity, the serious cause undermined by the commercialization." He also noted how 7-year-old Prince Archie, an older child, could express a desire to be kept off social media, but 4-year-old Lilibet's young age does not allow her to possess that same critical thinking.
Against that backdrop, Sykes stressed that authentic conversations around children's exposure to social media are needed, and that the Sussexes lacked the credibility to champion such a cause. He revealed how Markle and Harry's entire social-media thesis relied on the idea that children cannot make safe decisions about their online exposure. On that note, he criticized Markle's latest stunt, "Not showing a child's face does not prevent that child from becoming a social media star. If anything, it manufactures a curiosity gap, the goal of which is that people become more interested, not less."
And that's not all. Sykes also suggested that Markle's nonchalant display of her expensive designer clothes in the background did not align with the humanitarian nature of her activism. He slammed, "Given what she [Markle] is doing tomorrow — appearing at an event co-hosted by the World Health Organization, an institution primarily associated with fighting disease in the developing world, an organization most people associate with vaccination drives in sub-Saharan Africa or with things like the eradication of polio — it is a staggeringly tone-deaf image." Speaking at the 'Lost Screen Memorial,' the Duchess urged governments and parents to take action, stressing that online safety should be treated as a public health issue, not just a technology problem.
