Prince Harry revealed Tuesday that ahead of the Jan. 6 US Capitol riot, he warned Jack Dorsey, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Twitter, that the platform was being used by some for staging political unrest.
During the RE:WIRED tech forum, an online panel on misinformation in California, he said that he shared his concerns by sending an email to Dorsey the day before the attack, reported the Associated Press.
Harry, who lives in Southern California with wife Meghan Markle and their two children, said, “Jack and I were emailing each other prior to Jan. 6 where I warned him that his platform was allowing a coup to be staged." The British royal pointed out that the email was sent the day before the attack and then it happened and he hasn’t heard from the Twitter CEO since then. Twitter is yet to comment on his remarks.
Social media has been often attacked for not taking adequate steps to stop the spread of content and misinformation inciting political violence, and the US Capitol attack by supporters of former US President Donald Trump is often cited as an example of what happens when online hate is allowed to fester.
YouTube was also targeted by Harry, who said that many videos spreading misinformation related to coronavirus were left up even though they violated the platform’s own policies. He said that misinformation is a "global humanitarian crisis," and shared that he felt it personally over the years and he is now watching it happening across the globe, affecting everyone, reported Daily Mail.
The son of late Princess Diana said that he learned from a very early age that the "incentives of publishing are not necessarily aligned with the incentives of truth," and shared that he knows the story all too well. He added, "I lost my mother to this self-manufactured rabidness and obviously I'm determined not to lose the mother of my children to the same thing."
He even cited a report which concluded that more than 70% of the hate speech aimed at Meghan could be traced to accounts that are less than 50 in number. He shared that a "small group of accounts are allowed to create a huge amount of chaos" on digital platforms, and "without any consequence."
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