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Meghan Markle is facing criticism after posting an Instagram image with her daughter Lilibet before she departed for Geneva to speak about the harms of social media for children.
Commentator Tom Sykes, who has covered the royals for more than 15 years, claimed the hypocrisy was breathtaking.
“It is aboastful image. It is a vain image. It is a staggeringly tone-deaf image,” Sykes wrote on his blog the Royalist.
The Duchess of Sussex said in her “no child lost to social media” speech at a World Health Organisation (WHO) event on Sunday that children’s safety online was a “public health issue”.
After meeting WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in Switzerland, Markle stood in front of a public installation of 50 lightboxes, each displaying a phone’s lock screen image of children who died by suicide after online bullying and digital harm.
“Behind me stands the Lost Screen Memorial,” Markle told the audience.
“Not statistics. Not avatars. Not data points. Children. Each name belonged to a child who was loved beyond measure. A child whose laughter once filled a kitchen. Whose shoes once waited by a front door. Whose future once felt limitless.
“Now their faces ask the world questions we can no longer avoid: How many more millions of children will be harmed by products that, while innovative, are still designed without sufficient safeguards?
“Children today are being shaped by systems designed to capture attention at any cost: relentless algorithms, exploitative engagement, and endless exposure to harmful content that they are not seeking out.”
However, Sykes took issue with Markle’s social media behaviour before her speech.
The night before, Meghan shared a mirror selfie of herself and her 4-year-old daughter to her 4.5 million followers on Instagram, with the caption, “Mama’s little helper”.
“[Markle] 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," Sykes wrote.
The Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle speaks at the Lost Screen Memorial, ahead of the opening of the 79th World Health Assembly. Photo / Getty Images
Sykes argued that Markle’s Instagram account is a public-facing shop window to drive traffic to her businesses, calling her social media a “commercial operation”.
And at the centre of that operation, increasingly, is Lilibet, Sykes said.
Just because Lilibet’s face can’t be seen in her photos is not a sound defence, he said.
“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.”
“A 4-year-old cannot meaningfully consent to having their image broadcast to millions of strangers,” he added.
