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Prince Harry warns that online misinformation is creating a 'global crisis'

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex host a TIME100 Talks event - Matthew Fearn
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex host a TIME100 Talks event - Matthew Fearn

The Duke of Sussex has warned that misinformation “snowballs” from the internet into real life, hampering progress and distracting people from issues that they should be focusing on.

He said there was often no way of knowing where facts originated, causing a “global crisis” that was creating confusion and undermining trust.

“It is not restricted to certain platforms or certain social media conversations or groups,” he said.

“This is a global crisis—a global crisis of hate, a global crisis of misinformation, and a global health crisis.”

Both the Duke and the Duchess of Sussex were hosting a 90-minute “virtual conversation” in which they spoke to a series of friends and tech leaders, including Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, who is married to the Duchess’s friend Serena Williams, and Tristan Harris, president of the Centre for Humane Technology, about the dangers of social media and internet addiction.

The special edition of TIME100 Talks, called Engineering a Better World, featured a series of pre-recorded discussions as the couple continued to explore some of the key themes they have focused on since relocating to the US earlier this year.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex hosted a TIME100 Talks event - Matt Sayles
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex hosted a TIME100 Talks event - Matt Sayles

The Duke, 36, acknowledged that the role of the media was “absolutely vital in everything that is going on in the world,” but he added: “There’s a huge amount of trust that we all put into media and digital platforms that sometimes is undermined.

“Now, more than ever, there is this overwhelming desire for truth, because there is so much information being thrown from one side to the other.”

He said he and his wife, who are both in the middle of legal action against different newspaper groups, were keen to “remain neutral, in as much that truth is neutral.”

As the couple introduced the event from their new home in California, the Duke said: “For the things that I’m passionate about - certainly for the environment that I’ve been involved with for 12, 15 years now - what I see is the digital space is hampering the progress that needs to be made.

“This misinformation that seems to snowball from one place that is in the online space, and then ending up in our physical world. A lot of the time we don’t know where it comes from, we don’t know how to trace it back.”

He added: “These online platforms are distracting us from the very things we should be focusing on.”

Explaining the background to the couple’s work on issues such as gender equity, racial justice and climate change, the Duchess, 39,  said they had realised they could “continue to champion these things we are passionate about” and to effect change.

But she said that it was hard to make progress without getting to the “root cause of the problem,” which was online.

The Sussexes talk to Tristan Harris and Dr Safiya Umoja Noble - Time
The Sussexes talk to Tristan Harris and Dr Safiya Umoja Noble - Time

“We have been on a journey to learn as much as we can since January this year,” she said.

“It can feel really overwhelming to try to understand all the nuance of what happens online.

“And so we started with professors and experts in the field, with defectors from some of the largest platforms, neurologists—people to really help us view it through a holistic approach.”

She added: “It’s not just a tech problem, it's not just a mental health and wellbeing problem, this is a human problem and what’s happening to all of us online is affecting us deeply offline.”

The Duke later noted that there was a “huge commercial incentive in industrialising news” and said that when nothing was happening, news was created to fuel the 24-hour cycle.

“All of a sudden, the importance of facts is pushed to one side,” he said.

“Media is a huge responsibility and it is a huge power and a privilege. But when it gets taken out of responsible hands you have uncharted territory, chaos.”