Meghan Markle, Prince Harry, Prince William, and Kate Middleton Unite On Social Media Concerns

Though estranged from much of the royal family, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry share an abiding worry with their in-laws in the UK: a concern about the potentially dangerous power social holds. For the California-based couple, that meant the launch of a program to combat social media harm. For Kate Middleton and Prince William, that unease has prompted a number of discussions about how to best protect their kids from the ubiquitous platforms.

In an emotional interview last August, Harry spun out some of the darkest end results of social media use. Anyone, he said “could be in the next-door room on a tablet or on a phone and can be going down these rabbit holes. And before you know it, within 24 hours, they could be taking their life.”

“Our kids are young; they’re three and five. Amazing. But all you want to do as parents is protect them,” Meghan Markle said in that same conversation. “As we can see what’s happening in the online space, we know that there’s a lot of work to be done there.”

Based on a new interview with Jason Knauf, the former communications secretary for the Prince and Princess of Wales, that anxiety over how platforms such as Meta, X, and TikTok impact kids is one thing the distant couples share. On an episode of 60 Minutes Australia that aired Sunday, Knauf said that technology and social media were one of William and Kate’s greatest parental worries.

“The biggest thing we’ve talked about most, especially in those early years, was how he and the Princess were going to prepare their children for life in the public eye,” Kanuf said, noting that William “knew that he was going to be raising his kids to deal with social media and mobile phones. I definitely saw the worried mum and dad behind the scenes.”

It’s even possible that an effort to protect their kids from the propellant nature of social media information actually caused one of last year’s biggest online whirlwinds. The paradox began when Middleton was diagnosed with cancer at the beginning of the year. “Within a couple of weeks if you’re Prince William, you find out that both your wife and your father have cancer. I couldn’t believe it. It was awful, absolutely awful. It’s the lowest I’ve ever seen him,” Knauf said.

But as opposed to announcing her illness, as King Charles III did soon after diagnosis. William and Kate kept the news under wraps as they “didn’t want to say yet that she had cancer because they hadn’t told the children, and they were still working through how to tell the children,” as well as, Kanuf seems to suggest, the massive tide of online and media attention that would follow the news.

But, instead, Kate’s months-long absence from the public eye following a so-called “planned abdominal surgery” prompted its own tide, with speculation about her whereabouts spreading such a viral point that UK officials wondered if Russian disinformation networks were leveraging social media to spread rumors about Middleton’s status.

“The problem was that all this crazy conspiracy theory stuff kicked off in the background online,” Knauf acknowledged, a social media-fueled mess that likely caused the family more grief than if they’d pursued a different route.

With both families so actively concerned about toxic online behavior, one has to wonder if that shared enemy might be a bridge between the separated siblings. According to Kanuf, who also worked with Meghan and Harry in their earliest days in the royal spotlight (but later raised concerns about Markle’s treatment of staff), it’s impossible to say. “I can’t speculate on the future. They achieved a lot together and none of that can ever be taken away,” he said of William and Harry.

“This may be an extraordinary family that everyone gets to talk about and write about and see, be interviewed and all that sort of stuff. But at the end of the day, it’s a family.”