Meghan Markle calls out YouTube during YouTube SXSW stream

In a case that could be viewed, from a certain light, of someone biting the hand that streams them, former Suits star/retired Duchess/intermittent podcaster Meghan Markle lobbed some criticism at YouTube today—while being streamed by YouTube, as part of its coverage of SXSW.

Markle made a surprise keynote appearance at the conference today, appearing alongside Katie Couric, Brooke Shields, and Nancy Wang Yuen for an event timed to International Women’s Day. Titled “Breaking Barriers, Shaping Narratives: How Women Lead on and off the Screen,” the event put a large amount of focus on the impact of social media, and the various ways it deforms everybody’s brains every single moment of our modern lives.

Describing her own social media experiences, Markle laid out the horror show, saying that, “I keep my distance from it right now for my well-being, but the bulk of the bullying and abuse I was experiencing in social media and online was when I was pregnant with Archie and with Lili, and with a newborn, with each of them.” She added that, “You just think about that and to wrap your head about why people would be so hateful. It’s not catty, it’s cruel. Why you would do that when you’re pregnant or as a mom, at such a tender and sacred time.” She then unleashed what we can objectively categorize as an extremely corny zinger about the monetization of this kind of online abuse: “Even if it’s making dollars, it doesn’t make sense.”

Markle hit the more juicy stuff from there, targeting platforms that propagate the kind of toxicity she was discussing—including calling out, albeit not by name, YouTube, which was streaming the panel:

I cannot make sense of that, because I understand that there are certain platforms, today is a really good example, this is being streamed on one of those platforms, and it’s also fantastic because people are going to have access to hear all of this brilliance and all of this insight, and at the same time, it’s a platform that has quite a bit of hate and rhetoric and incentivizes people to create pages where they can churn out very, very inciting comments and conspiracy theories that can have a tremendously negative effect on someone’s mental health, on their physical safety.

Markle didn’t call out any particular creators by name, although we can’t help but note that her old “pal” Piers Morgan does have a very regular presence on the platform…

[via THR]