The guests sipped prosecco and chattered away while dessert was served at the third annual Project Health Minds Gala on Thursday.
The evening was winding down, but there was still one big award to give out: Humanitarian of the Year, which this year would be honoring Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, for creating The Parents Network through their nonprofit Archewell Foundation. The Parents Network supports families who have been harmed by social media.
Earlier this year, it hosted an event where the faces of young children were shown on giant smartphone screens; the children had lost their lives in ways their parents believe social media contributed to.
Thursday’s Gala was hosted by the nonprofit Project Healthy Minds, which provides free access to mental health services, especially focusing on young people who are struggling in a world dominated by technology. The event, and the conference the following day, gave a look into how young people and their parents are seeing social media, and revealed how grave the impact these platforms have had on mental health.
“Let me share a number with you,” Prince Harry said as he and his wife took the stage to accept the award. “Four thousand. That’s how many families the Social Media Victims Law Center is currently representing.”
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – OCTOBER 09: (L-R) Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, and Phil Schermer, the president of project healthy minds Image Credits:Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images for Project Healthy Minds) / Getty Images
That number only represents the parents who have been able to link their child’s harm to social media and who have the capacity to “fight back against some of the wealthiest, most powerful corporations in the world,” he said.
“We have witnessed the explosion of unregulated artificial intelligence, heard more and more stories from heartbroken families, and watched parents all over the world become increasingly concerned about their children’s digital lives,” Prince Harry continued.
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He said these families were up against corporations and lobbyists that were spending millions to suppress the truth; that algorithms were designed to “maximize data collection at any cost,” and said that social media was preying upon children.
Then, he called out Apple for its user privacy violations and Meta for saying privacy restrictions would cost them billions. He spoke about the harms of AI and what happened when researchers, posing as children, tested out an increasingly popular AI chatbot. “They experienced a harmful interaction every five minutes,” he said.
“This wasn’t content created by a third party,” he continued. “These were the company’s own chatbots working to advance their own depraved internal policies.”
The big announcement of the night was that The Parents Network would partner with ParentsTogether, another organization focused on family advocacy and online safety, to do more work protecting children from social media.
This is not the first time Prince Harry, in particular, has spoken out about social media harms. Back in April, the prince visited youth leaders in Brooklyn to talk to them about the rising influence of tech platforms, which have been incentivized by profit rather than safety. In January, he and Meghan also called out Meta for undermining free speech after the platform announced it would make changes to its fact-checking policy.
Their thoughts about the influence of tech companies do not exist in isolation.
Numerous studies have shown the negative impact social media is having on young people, creating a mental health crisis and fueling a loneliness epidemic. The next day, on Friday, World Mental Health Day, Project Healthy Minds threw …