Prince Harry speaks out against the ‘misogynistic term’ Mexgit for the first time

We know the formerly royal duo could hardly be thrilled with the proliferation of the term “Megxit”, coined by a troll in the aftermath of Brexit to describe Harry and Meghan’s decision to step back from royal duties.

Speaking at a WIRED Magazine panel, titled Internet Lie Machine, this week, Prince Harry said he was deeply distressed by the uptake of the term by mainstream media and considered it an example of the online and media hatred directed at the pair. 

While he understood that their decision to leave the royal family and the UK would be one of great upset and confusion, Prince Harry felt that the distaste for them was intensified by media scrutiny and whats he feels were just outright lies.

“Perhaps the most disturbing part of this was the number of British journalists who were interacting with them and amplifying the lies,” he said at the panel. “But they regurgitate these lies as truth.” Using the example of “Megxit”, he points out that the “misogynistic” term was created by a troll, but it was “amplified by royal correspondents, and it grew and grew and grew into mainstream media.” He’s alluding here, presumably to the fact that despite there benign two of them in their decision to withdraw from royal life, it was his wife that received the vast majority of the blame and hatred, both online and in the media. 

In fact, a recent report by Bot Sentinal found that Harry and Meghan were targets of a coordinated online hate campaign and that all it took was 83 Twitter accounts to proliferate hateful and racist content about the pair to more than 17 million users.

Referencing his mother Princess Diana and calling misinformation a “global humanitarian crisis”, Prince Harry explains that he “learned from a very early age that the incentives of publishing are not necessarily aligned with the incentives of truth… I lost my mother to this self-manufactured rabidness, and obviously, I’m determined not to lose the mother to my children to the same thing.”