Prince Harry warned Twitter boss the day before January 6 riots he was ‘allowing coup to be staged’
Prince Harry has revealed he warned Twitter‘s CEO Jack Dorsey that he was allowing a coup to be staged in the US just a day before the January 6 Capitol riots took place.
The Duke of Sussex was speaking on Tuesday on an online panel discussing disinformation in which he aired his grievances at the media.
Asked if he had spoken to Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey about his worries about social media, Harry said: ‘Jack and I were emailing each other prior to January 6 where I warned him his 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.’
On January 6, pro-Donald Trump protesters sought to overturn the election result by storming the Capitol, and the role of social media in spreading the conspiracy theories is being investigated.
Prince Harry has revealed he warned Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey that he was allowing a coup to be staged in the US just a day before the January 6 Capitol riots took place
The Duke of Sussex says he has not heard from the Twitter CEO (pictured) since pro-Trump protesters stormed the Capitol
Trump’s account was shut down that day and it has not yet been reopened.
During the panel hosted by Wired, Harry, who was listed as the co-founder of Archewell, also spoke about his personal experiences with the media.
He said: ‘Misinformation is a global humanitarian crisis. I felt it personally over the years and I’m now watching it happening globally, affecting everyone not just in America, literally everyone around the world.
‘The scariest part about this is you don’t need to be online to be affected by this. It’s important to recognise this problem did not originate in social media.
‘I learned from a very early age that the incentives of publishing are not necessarily aligned with the incentives of 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 of my children to the same thing.’
The role of social media is being investigated in the storming of the Capitol when pro-Trump supporters tried to overturn the election results
In March, Prince Harry joined the Aspen Institute as one of 15 commissioners to conduct a six-month study on the state of American misinformation and disinformation.
He said his experience investigating misinformation has opened his eyes to the scale of the problem in the US.
The 37-year-old, who lives in Southern California with Meghan and the couple’s two children, said the internet is ‘being defined by hate, division and lies’.
He said: ‘In one single household you can have three or four versions of reality when it comes to truth and fact. This is not a case of “this could happen to you”. This is already happening to you.
‘We can all feed into it if we’re not aware of it but if we’re aware of our digital diet and what we consume every single day then perhaps we’d be more conscious about what we pass on, what we don’t, what we are actually consuming and the fact it is actually affecting the way that we think.’
Harry said he and Meghan have frequently been the target of trolls online, despite not having individual account on social media.
On January 6, pro-Donald Trump protesters sought to overturn the election result by storming the Capitol
He then claimed the term Megxit, used to describe their dramatic departure from the Royal Family, was actually ‘misogynistic’.
He said: ‘In fact the term Megxit was or is a misogynistic term and it was created by a troll, amplified by royal correspondents and it grew and grew on to mainstream media but it began with a troll.’
It is not known how much Harry was paid for his appearance on the session called ‘The Internet Lie Machine’.
Last year, experts predicted he and Meghan, 40, could earn more than £1million each time they do a speech after signing up with an elite agency.
Prince Harry appeared alongside by Renée DiResta, technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, and Rashad Robinson, co-chair of the Aspen Commission on Information Disorder and president at Color Of Change.
The event took place the same day his wife Meghan spoke at an online conference organised by the New York Times to discuss ‘women reaching economic and professional parity.’
