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.”
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 a festival talk about mental health. For a few of those 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 has rewritten and rewritten childhood.
Following the Gala was a festival about Mental Health
The first panel was simply called “How Are Young People Doing in the Digital Age,” was introduced by Harry.
One panelist, Katie, spoke about how when she was just 12 years old, TikTok would fill her For You page with videos about dieting and losing weight; Katie ultimately developed an eating disorder.
Another panelist was Isabel Sunderland, the policy lead for the organization Design It For Us, which pushes for safer social media.
She recalls one day coming across an article about the Myanmar genocide, to which Meta’s platform, Facebook, was later accused of 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 that foment “hate and violence.” She always thought it was her fault that she encountered content regarding harmful topics like eating disorders.
“What I came to find through this research is that in fact, it’s designed by social media companies to increase addiction and time spent on their platforms,” she said.
The next panel, focused on childhood, spoke further about the harm social media is causing children. It was introduced by Meghan and moderated by journalist Katie Couric.
It began with Jonathan Haidt, the author of the best-selling book and controversial book, The Anxious Generation, presenting his findings.
Anxiety is up. Depression is up. Children are struggling in school. More children find their lives to be meaningless. There is no more outside playtime. They aren’t learning social cues because they aren’t going outside. Boys are being led down the path to gambling addictions. Young people don’t know how to handle conflict in real life because they aren’t spending time in real life — only online.
And while states are trying to pass legislation, it hasn’t been without a fight — the tech lobby’s are working hard.
“Play is about brain development,” Haidt told Couric on the panel. “When animals are deprived of play in early childhood, they come out much more anxious in adulthood.”
There is even a lessening of proper boredom time — those moments one spends looking out the window during a car ride or staring aimlessly ahead while waiting in a queue. Those moments gave the brain time to rest and have now been replaced by scrolling on tablets and smartphones.
Amy Neville, the community manager of The Parents’ Network and President of the Alexander Neville Foundation, joined the panel. She lost her son, Alexander, to an overdose, and is suing Snapchat for providing drug dealers access to her son.
“I quickly realized that families all over the United States were waking up, finding their kids dead in their bedrooms from pills purchased off of Snapchat,” she said. Her lawsuit is moving forward. “I feel like it’s a fight to the death,” she said. “I’m willing to go there.”
Another mother, Kirsten, took the stage. She is the mother of the young girl Katie, who sat on the previous panel. She spoke about how she thought she was doing everything right — checking her daughter’s phone each night and putting it away before she went to sleep. Katie still ended up in the hospital, though, with an eating disorder.
Kirsten went through text messages and search history. Someone then sent her an article about how TikTok is showing young girls’ eating disorder content.
“My husband and I, we didn’t know about the For You page,” she said. “This was not content that my daughter was seeking, but rather content that was coming to her on repeat.”
The consensus of that panel — as with both events — was more action.
Throughout the event, people called for more legislative action, more accountability from tech platforms, more speaking, and more people banding together to put boundaries between them and social media. Though harm is said to fill the presence, hope remains around the corner.
“We can and we will build the movement that all families and all children deserve,” Meghan said at the Gala. “We know that when parents come together, when communities unite, waves are made. We’ve seen it happen, and we’re watching it grow.”
