Guests sipped Prosecco and chatted while dessert was served at the 3rd Annual Project Health Mind Gala in New York on Thursday night.
The night was coming to a close, but there was still one big prize to be awarded. It’s the Humanitarian of the Year Award, which honors Prince Harry and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who founded the Parents Network through their not-for-profit Archewell Foundation. Parents Network supports families harmed by social media.
Earlier this year, it hosted an event where young children’s faces were projected onto giant smartphone screens. Children lost their lives in ways that their parents believed social media played a role in.
Thursday’s gala was hosted by Project Healthy Minds, a nonprofit organization that provides free access to mental health services, especially for young people who are struggling in a world dominated by technology. The event, and the following day’s conference, investigated how young people and their parents view social media and found that these platforms are having a serious impact on their mental health.
“Let me tell you the numbers,” said Prince Harry, who took to the stage with his wife to accept the award. “4,000 people. This is the number of families currently represented by the Social Media Victims Law Center.”
Prince Harry said the figure only represented parents who were able to link their children’s harm to social media and who were capable of “fighting back against some of the richest and most powerful corporations in the world”.
“We’ve seen the explosion of unregulated artificial intelligence, heard more and more stories from heartbroken families, and watched parents around the world become increasingly concerned about their children’s digital lives,” he continued.
tech crunch event
san francisco
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October 27-29, 2025
He said these families are confronting corporations and lobbyists who are spending millions of dollars to cover up the truth. He said the algorithms were designed to “maximize data collection at all costs” and that social media was preying on children.
He then accused Apple of violating user privacy, and Meta said privacy restrictions would cost the company billions of dollars. He talked about the harms of AI and what happened when researchers tested the increasingly popular AI chatbots by posing as children. “They experienced a harmful interaction every five minutes,” he said.
“This is not content created by a third party,” he continued. “These were the company’s own chatbots working to further its own corrupt internal policies.”
The big announcement of the night was that Parents Network would be partnering with Parents Together, another organization focused on family advocacy and online safety, to increase efforts to protect children from social media.
This isn’t the first time Prince Harry has spoken out about the harms of social media. Back in April, the prince visited youth leaders in Brooklyn and spoke about the growing influence of tech platforms that are motivated by profit over safety. In January, Mehta and Duchess Meghan also criticized Mehta and Duchess Meghan for undermining free speech after Mehta announced changes to her fact-checking policy.
The couple’s ideas about the impact of technology companies do not exist in isolation.
Numerous studies have shown that social media is having a negative impact on young people, causing a mental health crisis and contributing to the loneliness epidemic. The following Friday, World Mental Health Day, Project Healthy Minds held a festival talk on mental health. For some of these panels, Project Health Mind collaborated with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s Archewell Foundation to hold discussions with parents, advocates and experts about how social media is rewriting and rewriting childhood.
The gala was followed by a festival on mental health.
The first panel was simply called “What are young people doing in the digital age” and was introduced by Harry.
One of the panelists, Katie, talked about how when she was just 12 years old, TikTok filled her For You page with videos about dieting and weight loss. Katie eventually developed an eating disorder.
Another panelist was Isabel Sunderland, policy leader at Design It For Us, an organization that promotes safer social media.
She recalled one day coming across an article about the genocide in Myanmar. Mehta’s platform, Facebook, was later accused of involvement in the article. This article led her down a rabbit hole as she tried to understand how the platforms she uses every day could be used as tools to incite “hate and violence.” She always thought it was her fault for encountering content about harmful topics such as eating disorders.
“What I discovered through this research is that social media companies are actually designed to increase addiction and time spent on their platforms,” she said.
The next panel focused on childhood and talked more about the harm social media is having on children. It was introduced by Duchess Meghan and moderated by journalist Katie Couric.
It began with the publication of research by Jonathan Haidt, author of the best-selling and controversial book, An Anxious Generation.
Anxiety increases. Depression is happening. Children are struggling in school. More and more children feel that their lives are meaningless. There is no more time to play outside. Because they haven’t been outside, they haven’t learned social cues. Boys are being led down the path to gambling addiction. Young people do not know how to deal with conflicts in real life because they do not spend time in real life, they only spend time online.
And it hasn’t been without a fight as states try to pass the legislation, with the technology lobbies hard at work.
“Play is about brain development,” Hite told Couric during the panel discussion. “When animals are deprived of play in early childhood, they become more anxious as adults.”
Even proper boredom, like staring out the window while riding in a car or staring aimlessly ahead while waiting in line, has decreased. Those moments used to give our brains time to rest, but now they’ve been replaced by scrolling on our tablets and smartphones.
Amy Neville, Community Manager for The Parents’ Network and Chair of the Alexander Neville Foundation, joined the panel. She lost her son Alexander to an overdose and is suing Snapchat for giving drug dealers access to her son.
“Families across America woke up and quickly found their children dying in their bedrooms from pills they bought from Snapchat,” she said. Her case is moving forward. “I feel like this is a fight to the death,” she said. “I’d be happy to go there.”
Another mother, Kirsten, took to the stage. She is the mother of the little girl, Katie, who was sitting in the front panel. She talked about how she thought she was doing everything right, checking her daughter’s cell phone every night and putting it away before bed. However, Katie still ended up in the hospital with an eating disorder.
Kirsten looked at her text messages and search history. Then someone sent her an article about how TikTok was showing eating disorder content on young girls.
“Neither my husband nor I knew about the For You page,” she said. “This wasn’t the content my daughter was looking for, it was the content that kept coming back.”
The consensus on this panel, like both events, was more behavioral.
Throughout the event, people called for more legislative action, more accountability for tech platforms, more voices, and more people coming together to set boundaries with social media. It is said that harm fills the presence, but hope remains just around the corner.
“We can and will build a movement that deserves every family and every child,” Meghan said at the gala. “We know that when parents come together and communities come together, it creates waves. We’ve seen it happen and we’re watching it grow.”
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