*Prince Harry was a guest speaker at Wired magazine’s RE:WIRED virtual summit in New York City, where he joined the “Internet Lie Machine” panel discussion and dished about the term “Megxit.”
The term “Megxit” went viral after Meghan and Harry stepped back as senior working royals in January 2020.
“Misinformation is a global humanitarian crisis,” said Harry, before addressing the term “Megxit.”
“The term ‘Megxit’ was or is a misogynistic term that was created by a troll, amplified by world correspondents, and it grew and grew and grew onto mainstream media. But it began with a troll,” he said, PEOPLE reports.
Harry also opened up about his history with the media.
READ MORE: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Cover Time’s Most Influential People of 2021 Issue
“I felt it personally over the years, and I’m now watching it happen globally affecting everyone, not just America, literally everyone around the world,” he said. “I learned from a very early age that the incentives of publishing are not necessarily aligned with the incentives of the truth.”
He added, “I know the story all too well. I lost my mother to this self-manufactured rabidness, and obviously I’m determined not to lose the mother to my children to the same thing.”
Prince Harry told the WIRED panel, “The scale of 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 in one single household.”
Harry later cited an independent report that found “more than 70 percent of the hate speech about my wife on Twitter can be traced to fewer than 50 accounts.”
“This isn’t just a social media problem. It’s a media problem,” he said. “I’ve grown up learning that news should be sacred ground. You don’t have to be Logan Roy or Rupert Murdoch to understand that clickbait is the descendant of targeted advertising.”
He added, “Real journalists have the power and the will to tackle racism, misogyny, lies, all of it from within their own systems.”
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