Harassment of Meghan Markle and Why It Matters
Meghan Markle lives rent-free in a lot of our heads. The actress turned lifestyle blogger, turned princess (technically duchess), turned glocal icon has created a new kind of celebrity along with her husband Harry. A combination of archaic nobility meets virality, meets Hollywood, meets philanthropy. Americans who follow celebrities can’t seem to get enough of her, and Brits can’t seem to get enough of hating her.
The Right in both the US and UK have been obsessed with Meghan since she and Harry announced their engagement, and she’s been subjected to an exorbitant amount of hate, harassment, and harm both online and in the tabloid press ever since. In 2019 HOPE not hate analyzed a sample of 5,000 tweets using anti-Meghan hashtags and found that just 20 accounts were responsible for 70% of the anti-Meghan content. Which suggests a coordinated targeted harassment campaign.
Meghan and Harry’s decision to leave the Royal Family early last year didn’t stop the harassment. It got worse. Bot Sentinel recently analyzed more than 114,000 anti-Meghan tweets and found similar results to what HOPE not hate found with 83 accounts driving roughly 70% of the hateful anti-Meghan content online. Per reporting from Buzzfeed Bot Sentinel found that “the majority of the hate and misinformation about the couple originated from a small group of accounts whose…
