Attack organised on social media: Prince Harry on US Capitol riots

London: Capitol hill riots shocked many around the globe and recently Prine Harry opened about the riots and blamed social media for spreading misinformation which he feels was a key element of the riots planning. 

The former senior royal said in a rare interview with Fast Company, the digital landscape needs to change.

"We have seen time and again what happens when the real-world cost of misinformation is disregarded. There is no way to downplay this," he said. "There was a literal attack on democracy in the United States, organised on social media, which is an issue of violent extremism." 

Harry added that we should "avoid buying into the idea that social media is the ultimate modern-day public square and that any attempt to ask platforms to be accountable to the landscape they've created is an attack or restriction of speech." "I think it's a false choice to say you have to pick between free speech or a more compassionate and trustworthy digital world. They are not mutually exclusive," he said.

"Dominant online platforms have contributed to and stoked the conditions for a crisis of hate, a crisis of health, and a crisis of truth," Harry says. "And I stand by that, along with millions of others who see and feel what this era has done at every level -- we are losing loved ones to conspiracy theories, losing a sense of self because of the barrage of mistruths, and at the largest scale, losing our democracies."

"The need for that is greater than ever before. So I’m encouraged by and grateful for the groundswell of people who work -- or have worked -- inside these very platforms choosing to speak up against hate, violence, division, and confusion," Prince added. 

By talking further, Harry also talked about his experience and the hatred that he and his wife Meghan Markle received on social media, "I was really surprised to witness how my story had been told one way, my wife’s story had been told one way, and then our union sparked something that made the telling of that story very different," he admits. "That false narrative became the mothership for all of the harassment you’re referring to. It wouldn’t have even begun had our story just been told truthfully."