meghan markle social media
Fortune

How Meghan Became “the Most Trolled Person in the World”

A hard look at why Royal Twitter (Instagram, YouTube etc.) is so toxic

Here’s a bet you shouldn’t take: If you can scroll through the comments section of a social media post about Meghan Markle without finding A) someone saying something horrible about her, B) someone saying something horrible about Kate Middleton or C) multiple people getting into it over why either duchess is better, worse, more beautiful or less manipulative than the other, we’ll give you $100. Heck, make it $1,000!

It’s a bad bet to take because 99.9 per cent of the time—and frankly, that 0.1 per cent is when the comments are turned off—you simply cannot be within a sceptre’s length of “royal Twitter” or Instagram or Tumblr or Youtube, and not quickly come to the conclusion that it is deeply toxic. Like, “I need to shower in bleach and spend at least three hours alone with my Vibration Frequencies meditation playlist to feel vaguely human again” levels of poison.

This sort of outright ugliness—which is certainly fuelled to an extent by the tabloids that Harry and Meghan are currently embroiled in legal battles with—is part of the reason why, last weekend, Meghan Markle said she’d been told that in 2019 she was “the most trolled person in the entire world,” despite being on maternity leave for eight months of that time. Speaking on the Teen Therapy podcast for World Mental Health Day, she characterized the abuse that was “manufactured and churned out” as “almost unsurvivable” in its scope and intensity. “You can’t think of what that feels like,” she continued. “I don’t care if you’re 15 or 25—if people are saying things about you that aren’t true, what that does to your mental and emotional health is so damaging.”

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The toxicity toward Meghan comes in many forms. There are, for example, explicitly “anti Meghan” (or as they often call her, “Me-gain”) Twitter accounts that flood the replies of royal reporters whenever there’s news about her, to point out some perceived hypocrisy, poke fun at her “word salad” of “wokeness,” take an old-fashioned pot-shot at her appearance or dredge up some wacky conspiracy theory (like, that she’s lying about her age or that she faked her pregnancy with Archie).

There are also Tumblr accounts and Youtube channels that pump out multiple smear videos a week—often voiceovers over top of unflattering images of Meghan—dedicated to “exposing her lies,” often drawing the “truth” from a bank of elaborate fantasies about Meghan’s past or her plans for the future. (From secret children to Soros, it’s all there!) Then there are the Kate and William stans bashing away furiously at keyboards, trolling Meghan as a twisted tribute to their duchess.

More hearteningly, most of the people using the “Sussex Squad” hashtag are enthusiastic fans who often mobilize in a positive way to support their duchess, including raising money for charity. But this fraught dynamic of for/against camps breeds an adversarial zealotry that can get very dark.

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While Meghan says that she doesn’t read what’s written about her—for obvious reasons—this maelstrom of trolling is a daily part of Yvonne Johannesen’s life. She runs @dukeandduchessofsussexdaily, an Instagram account that has shared updates on all things Sussex with its more than 428,000 followers since 2018. A self-described “average gal and royal enthusiast,” Johannesen is a 33-year-old Norwegian, with three kids and a job as a nurse in a local nursing home. By and large, she says her experience of running the account has been “wonderful”—she’s made many new friends doing it, and loves the community of like-minded people she’s found. There have, however, been times when she’s thought about shutting the whole thing down.

“It’s such a fun hobby, but it can take a lot of my time, and there’s also the hate and negativity, which can really affect you,” she says, referring to the barrage of “hateful comments” that appear on her posts on a daily basis. While she’s fine with differing opinions and debate if it’s civil, Johannesen says she frequently has to block people who don’t “behave,” or report misinformation or are racist. Cruel comments about Meghan’s hair and appearance are an everyday occurrence, she says.

“There have also been occasions when they really go low by commenting on baby Archie’s appearance,” Johannesen says. “I find that especially upsetting as a mother.” People also take their anger with Meghan and Harry out on her. “I have received DMs from individuals that feel that I should find myself a new hobby because they think me running this account is ridiculous,” she says, although, “thankfully, that is very rare.”

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More common—and infinitely more complicated—is the “garden variety” toxicity you’ll see around the royal internet. Take the exchange underneath a recent post (above) from an account that tracks both Meghan and Kate’s fashion choices—on this day, the post was about Kate, who’d just visited researchers looking into ways to prevent baby loss. The sensitivity of the subject meant nothing to the user who commented “Wow, Botox”—nor to the person who replied, “Your idol does it every week,” referring, we presume, to Meghan, who featured on the first commenter’s feed. This devolved into different people slinging insults about the duchesses, who were respectively likened to a “skeleton hag” and a “melted candle,” but also directed at each other, the mildest of which was “check your eyes and then check your brain.”

On one hand, this sort of argument is so schoolyard-circa-third-grade that it’s almost silly. On the other, those are some profoundly nasty things being slung around so casually—and most perplexingly, some of the vilest comments came from people who ostensibly support Meghan, who has been increasingly vocal about the need to change the way we relate to each other online. As Harry put it during their Time 100 appearance a few weeks ago, “It’s vital that we reject hate speech, misinformation and online negativity. What we consume, what we are exposed to, and what we engage with online, has a real effect on all of us.”

“This is such a familiar story to me,” says Lynn Zubernis, a clinical psychologist and academic who’s written extensively about fan culture. “Online discourse in every area of fandom has gotten so much more toxic and virulent, with so many ad hominem attacks and so much racism, misogyny and homophobia. It’s all just gotten so much more brutal.”

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Zubernis, who’s tracked the evolution of internet fandom for more than 15 years, points to the “well-known psychological tenet” that the more you surround yourself with like-minded views, the more extreme those views become over time. (Echo chambers, anyone?) Combined with another psych 101 group behaviour theory—that we build social cohesion by establishing “in groups” and “out groups”—you begin to understand how easily an opinion can devolve into an obsession. There’s also the fact that within groups you can achieve “status” by actively defending or propelling the cause. “It’s perceived as ‘you went out and fought the good fight’ and you come back to your ‘in group’ and they welcome you with open arms and comfort you,” Zubernis explains. “Now, that sense of safety and cohesion is built even more by your foray as a knight of the in group going out there and making attacks.”

The current moment of unease and uncertainty is only amplifying this intensity. “As humans in general, we’re an angrier group,” says Zubernis. “We feel more powerless, more helpless, and there’s more economic inequality than ever before.” Not only do those feelings of vulnerability lead us to seek out the safety of some sort of community—even if it is one built on hate—but that anger demands an outlet. “And while it’s not socially acceptable to go out and attack someone, it is socially acceptable to attack someone who’s defined as a celebrity—and be as vile as you want.”

Zubernis says Meghan Markle, much like someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is a “magnet” for this kind of anger. “She’s a woman, a person of colour, someone perceived as an outsider, someone who is looking for change instead of upholding tradition,” she says. Even as a casual observer, she’s noted commentary like “Meghan should know her place” or “She should go back to where she came from.”

This is exacerbated by the fact that the narrative—not, we emphasize, the real people themselves, because who even really knows—around William and Kate vs. Harry and Meghan is such a clear “establishment vs. tradition” story. “They’re so diametrically opposed to each other, and that’s really playing into this fight,” says Zubernis. “There’s a lot of fodder there for people to latch on to, so it’s probably a particularly satisfying ‘in group’ to belong to. Being ‘anti Meghan and Harry’ gives you a lot to work with.”

The social platforms themselves are complicit in creating this toxic environment. It’s something Meghan and Harry are actively campaigning to address. In August, Harry wrote an op-ed in Fast Company, where he called upon companies who advertise on Facebook, Instagram et al. to boycott them “to demand change from the very places that give a safe haven and vehicle of propagation to hate and division.” With this, he was referring to what Imran Ahmed calls the “economics of social media.”

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Ahmed is the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, an NGO that is part of the coalition Stop Hate For Profit, which Harry shouts out in his op-ed. “Social media is part of the attention economy,” he says. “It may have started with the intention of connecting people, but it’s now a machine to keep us on those platforms as long as possible.” Why? “Because, for example, at Facebook 98 per cent of all their money comes from advertising. We’re not the customers. We’re the product, and we’re packaged and sold to advertisers, who are looking for the eyeballs to keep scrolling as adverts are served to us.”

And what is catnip to the human eyeball? “Controversy,” says Ahmed, which is why the algorithms are primed to favour the contentious over the harmonious. “As people, it’s what we’re attracted to.” It’s why we crane at car crashes and why, for some, watching Harry and Meghan “go through the gamut of human emotions—pain, anger, frustration—is more entertaining than spending half an hour trying to work out what to watch on Netflix.” As the various platforms grow ever larger, with an ever expanding need for this kind of “sticky” content, the worse he predicts it will get.

The fix could be quite simple, Ahmed says, and it lies in regulating social media, which he likens to the Wild West. “Eventually, most societies require rules and red lines,” he explains. “The big tech companies have been poor at either setting those lines or policing them, or they’ve been gaslighting us, saying, ‘Why don’t you behave better?’ Actually, it’s your platform. Pretending you have no responsibility or capacity to do that is frankly outrageous.” Most platforms have already laid out terms of use that forbid abusing someone on the basis of their gender, sexuality, race, for example—but they’ve been slow to enforce them. (Case in point: Facebook banned Holocaust deniers as recently as…last Monday.)

What this lack of consequences has done, Ahmed explains, is create worlds without the kinds of norms that generally govern our behaviour. Basically, we need other people to tell us not to be bad. Without that, well, we can’t be trusted. “It’s validating to have people tell you you’re right in holding your opinions, even if they’re highly offensive,” says Ahmed. “What I find really interesting about the communities of trolls, is when looking inside them you see the humanity, the damage, the hopes, the aspirations, the desire for community and the desire for love and to feel accepted, all used to such malignant ends.” He points to the abuse directed at Meghan Markle as a textbook case.

“I think of the wasted potential of people capable of building a community around them, of communicating effectively. How much could you be doing if you were not using that to abuse a young Black woman?”

 

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