Prince Harry Warned Jack Dorsey Before the Capitol Riots
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Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, revealed at the RE:WIRED conference today that he had emailed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey prior to the Capitol riots on January 6th to warn him that âhis platform was allowing a coup to be staged. That email was sent the day before and then it happened and I haven't heard from him since.â
Twitter declined to comment. But the incident speaks to how seriously the Duke of Sussex takes misinformation and media manipulation. For him, itâs personal. âI learned from a very early age that the incentives of publishing are not necessarily aligned with the incentives of truth,â he said, especially because the United Kingdom press is prone to conflating profit with purpose. âThey successfully turned fact-based news into opinion-based gossip with devastating consequences,â he added. âI know this story all too well. I lost my mother to this self manufactured rabidness, and obviously Iâm determined not to lose the mother of my children to the same thing.â
Harry spoke as part of a panel on misinformation, moderated by WIREDâs Editor-at-Large Steven Levy and also featuring Renée DiResta, the Technical Research Manager at Stanford Internet Observatory and Rashad Robinson, a Co-Chair on the Aspen Commission on Information Disorder and President of Color Of Change.
How did the internetâs early ideals of truth and democracy become so warped? And how do we straighten the whole thing out?
âMisinformation has always existed,â explained DiResta. âWhatâs different now is the way in which it spreads, the speed at which it spreads, and the way in which each individual person participates in moving information from their community into other communities.â This individualized spread of information has led to the creation of what DiResta calls, âbespoke realities, places where people tend to congregate with those who are very like minded.â
Such bespoke realities are especially vulnerable to âampliganda,â a term DiResta coined to capture how social media has turned users into not only content creators, but content disseminators. In practice, this often results in amplifying the content that outrages us âbecause thatâs the content being pushed in our feed.â
Speaking to the social justice implications of these actions, Robinson added that, âThe fact of the matter is that inequality, injustice, all these things are not unfortunate like a car accident. It is part of design.â According to Robinson, these platforms profiteering off of hate and fear helped drive the false narratives around the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and the advancement of voter suppression techniques in the lead up to last yearâs election. He explained, âWe have a set of self-regulated companies and self-regulated companies are unregulated companies.â
Watch the RE:WIRED conference on WIRED.com.
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