Prince Harry claimed Tuesday he personally warned Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey his platform was being used as a conduit by plotters of a “coup” ahead of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol before lamenting he never had a reply – then or since.
“Jack and I were emailing each other prior to 6 January, I warned him that his platform was allowing a coup to be staged. That email was sent the day before and then it happened, and I haven’t heard from him since”, the scorned Duke of Sussex said.
He was speaking via video at a Wired magazine event titled “The Internet Lie Machine” billed as exploring “the real cost of a lie on the internet to ourselves, our communities (and) our societies.”
Harry sought to link misinformation and hatred on social media with the British press’s treatment of his mother, Princess Diana, and wife, Meghan Markle, accusing news publishers of running a “digital dictatorship” and lambasting “pirates with press cards who have hijacked the most powerful industry in the world”.
The 37-year-old resident of Montecito, California, then added nobody is safe from misinformation being spread online:
I learned from a very early age that the incentives of publishing are not necessarily aligned with the incentives of truth… I lost my mother to this self-manufactured rabidness, and I’m determined not to lose the mother of my children to the same thing, this self-manufactured rabidness.
I said many months ago, ‘they won’t stop until she’s dead’. That was more of a warning, not a challenge, and the scale of the misinformation now is terrifying. No one’s safe from it, no one is protected from it. You can’t hide from it. And we continue to see lives ruined, families destroyed.
Harry also said the term “Megxit”, a phrase used by the British press to describe the decision by him and his wife Meghan to quit their Royal duties, was a misogynistic term and yet another example of online and media hatred.
As Harry spoke Meghan appeared solo in the New York Times DealBook online summit to guide women on how they can reach “economic and professional parity.”
During the 30-minute session, Meghan was asked if she has any “anxiety” about getting involved in politics after she wrote to members of the U.S. Congress and Senate to call for paid leave for new parents last month, SKY News reports.
The duchess replied: “I don’t see this as a political issue, frankly.
“Look, there is certainly a precedent amongst my husband’s family and the royal family of not having any involvement in politics, but I think this is… I mean, paid leave, from my standpoint, is just a humanitarian issue.”
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