Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, last night published the clearest photograph yet of her daughter Princess Lilibet’s face on Instagram.
Meghan marked Valentine’s Day by posting an image on her Instagram account showing Prince Harry lifting their 4-year-old daughter into the air, Lilibet in a pink ballet outfit clutching red balloons.
The caption—“These two + Archie = my forever Valentines ♥️”—was simple and affectionate, and the exclusive first picture of Lilibet will drive vast amounts of traffic and clicks to Meghan’s personal page.
But the decision to publish seems to run counter to Prince Harry’s hard line on the dangers of social media, and will fuel questions about how aligned the couple really are on the issue.
It is the first time Lilibet’s face has been this clearly visible in an image shared on one of Meghan’s own platforms, after years of the couple either obscuring their children’s faces, using side-profiles, or otherwise anonymizing how they appeared in documentaries, social media and family portraits.
To anyone who has followed Meghan’s story, this looks like a predictable next step in the Sussexes building a family-wide super-brand, with their children also now (absurdly) described as partners in their philanthropic missions.
But the timing is jarring. This week, Harry has been in Los Angeles offering emotional support to parents at the heart of a landmark California trial in which Instagram’s parent company Meta and Google’s YouTube are accused of designing “addiction machines” that harm children’s mental health.
On Feb. 11, Harry joined grieving families as they gave evidence at the opening of the bellwether case K.G.M. v. Meta et al., in which a young woman alleges that social media features deliberately engineered to keep her online contributed to severe anxiety, body dysmorphia, and depression.
He was filmed near tears as he praised the parents for their courage, drew parallels with his own legal fights, and framed the proceedings as a critical moment to hold big tech accountable for the impact of its products on young people.
These parents have publicly welcomed Harry’s backing. They deserve to be taken at their word when they say his presence helps.
The Royalist does not doubt that Harry is sincere.
In a podcast conversation with comedian Hasan Minhaj earlier this year, Harry heatedly described social media platforms as being run by “evil, wicked people” who “farm our children’s mindset and market it for themselves.”
Last year, Harry and Meghan jointly unveiled the Lost Screen Memorial, an installation of around 50 smartphone-shaped lightboxes, each showing the lock-screen image of a child whose death their families believe was linked to social media. It was one of the most visually striking campaigns of their post-royal careers, and a deeply affecting event.
The memorial, created through their now-shuttered Archewell Foundation, was explicitly framed as a call for stronger online safety laws and a rebuke to tech companies that, in Harry’s view, have left parents carrying an impossible burden.
So Harry has placed himself firmly and emotionally on the side of families who believe Instagram helped kill their children.
If that is the case, why on Earth is Meghan leaning harder than ever into that same platform as the engine of her business, family, and personal brand?
Meghan’s entire commercial ecosystem is now funneling sales, heavily promoted via Instagram, through both the dedicated @aseverofficial account and her personal @meghan page.
Meghan is one of Instagram’s brightest stars. Her products, her television show, and even her charitable projects are being marketed in large part through a platform her husband clearly loathes and despises.
That tension has not gone unnoticed.
This week, The Royalist asked sources close to Meghan whether the couple saw any contradiction between Harry’s campaigning and Meghan’s online activity. A spokesperson argued that there was no conflict, noting that advocating for safer, better-regulated social media is perfectly compatible with sharing carefully selected, controlled images of one’s children. The line from their camp has long been that privacy is about choice and control rather than total absence.
But if they are now publishing non-anonymized, full-face photographs of the children directly onto Instagram, that is a clear departure from where we have been so far.
Many other high-profile actors, musicians, and public figures choose not to post their children’s faces online, even while running large commercial operations; their children simply don’t appear. But then, they are not trying to sell a perfect family as a product.
Harry and Meghan have, intentionally or not, turned Archie and Lilibet into the most famous and recognizable children in the world. Owing to Meghan’s own branded content, these two small children are now woven into the Sussex myth-making machine. Today’s Lilibet Valentine’s Day image makes that more explicit than ever.
It also widens what already feels like a yawning gap between Harry and Meghan’s stances on social media.
Complicating matters, Meghan has previously suggested that she seldom uses social media. In earlier interviews, she spoke of avoiding platforms for her “own self-preservation” and compared social media to an addiction she didn’t want to feed.
Harry, however, has repeatedly acknowledged that he still consumes online content and is acutely aware of what is said about them. In a recent Harper’s Bazaar profile, Meghan even drew a distinction between the “media” she consumes and the “different media” her husband reads—widely interpreted as a nod to his continued exposure to social networks and online commentary.
So here we are. No one can pretend to be astonished that Meghan is now putting her children’s faces on Instagram and that those pictures will drive clicks and, ultimately, business. We have been heading in this direction for a long time.
But it does feel cynical, perhaps using the latest Andrew scandal for cover, and it will make it much harder for the couple to sustain the argument that everyone else has been invading their privacy while they themselves have simply sought to protect it.
If you truly believed a system was that irredeemably harmful, you might reasonably expect to step back from using it as the cornerstone of your business and family branding. Meghan’s actions are likely to fuel rumors of strain and disagreement between the couple over the appropriate level of privacy for their family.
Lilibet’s picture highlights a gap between her parents’ rhetoric on the harms of social media and the way they now use those platforms—a gap that critics will be only too happy to exploit, and that will be increasingly hard for the Sussexes to explain away.
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