Guests sipped prosecco and chatted while dessert was served on the third annual Project Health Minds Gala on Thursday evening in New York.
The evening was coming to a detailed, but there was still one big award up for grabs: Humanitarian of the Year, which this yr would honor Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, for founding the Parents Network through their nonprofit Archewell Foundation. The Parent Network supports families who’ve been harmed by social media.
Earlier this yr, an event was held there during which the faces of young children were shown on giant smartphone screens; The children had lost their lives in a way that their parents believed social media had contributed to.
Thursday's gala was hosted by the nonprofit Project Healthy Minds, which provides free access to mental health services and focuses particularly on young people struggling in a world dominated by technology. The event and the conference the next day provided an insight into the way in which young people and their parents perceive social media and highlighted the intense impact of those platforms on mental health.
“Let me provide you with a number,” Prince Harry said as he and his wife took the stage to just accept the award. “Four thousand. That's what number of families the Social Media Victims Law Center currently represents.”
That number represents only those parents who’ve been in a position to link their child's harm to social media and who’ve the power to “fight back against a number of the richest and strongest firms on the planet,” Prince Harry said.
“We’ve witnessed the explosion of unregulated artificial intelligence, heard an increasing number of stories from heartbroken families, and watched as parents world wide turn into increasingly concerned about their children’s digital lives,” he continued.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
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27–29 October 2025
He said these families were coping with corporations and lobbyists who spent tens of millions to suppress the reality; that algorithms were designed to “maximize data collection in any respect costs” and that social media would exploit children.
He then criticized Apple for violating its users' privacy and Meta for saying privacy restrictions would cost them billions. He talked in regards to the harms of AI and what happened when researchers posing as children tested an increasingly popular AI chatbot. “Every five minutes they experienced a harmful interaction,” he said.
“This was not content created by a 3rd party,” he continued. “These were corporate chatbots working to advance their very own corrupt internal policies.”
The big announcement of the evening was that The Parents Network could be partnering with ParentsTogether, one other organization focused on family advocacy and online safety, to do more work protecting children from social media.
This isn’t the primary time that Prince Harry, specifically, has spoken out in regards to the damage on social media. Back in April, the prince visited youth leaders in Brooklyn to confer with them in regards to the increasing influence of tech platforms which can be focused on profit fairly than security. In January, he and Meghan also accused Meta of undermining free speech after the platform announced it could make changes to its fact-checking policy.
The couple's thoughts on the influence of tech firms don’t exist in isolation.
Numerous studies have shown the negative impact social media has on young people, causing a mental health crisis and fueling an epidemic of loneliness. The next day, on Friday, World Mental Health Day, Project Healthy Minds tHe gave a festival discuss mental health. For a few of these panels, Project Health Minds teamed up with Prince Harry and Meghan's Archewell Foundation to check with parents, advocates and experts how social media has continually reshaped childhood.
The gala was followed by a mental health festival
The first panel, simply titled “How are young people doing within the digital age?” was initiated by Harry.
One panelist, Katie, talked about how TikTok filled her For You page with videos about weight-reduction plan and shedding pounds when she was just 12 years old; Katie eventually developed an eating disorder.
Another panelist was Isabel Sunderland, policy director for safer social media organization Design It For Us.
She remembers that someday she got here across an article in regards to the genocide in Myanmar that Meta's platform Facebook was reporting on. was later accused of involvement. The article led her down a rabbit hole as she tried to know how the platforms she uses day-after-day may very well be used as tools to foment “hatred and violence.” She all the time thought it was her fault that she got here across content on harmful topics like eating disorders.
“In this research, I discovered that it was actually designed by social media firms to extend addiction and time spent on their platforms,” she said.
The next panel, focused on childhood, continued to speak in regards to the harm that social media does to children. It was introduced by Meghan and hosted by journalist Katie Couric.
It began with Jonathan Haidt, the creator of the bestseller and controversial book“The Anxious Generation,” who presented his findings.
The fear is great. Depression has increased. Children have problems at college. More and more children feel that their lives are meaningless. There is not any more play time outside. They don't learn social cues because they don't go outside. Boys are led down the trail to gambling addiction. Young people don't know how one can take care of conflict in real life because they don't spend time in real life – only online.
And as states attempt to pass laws, it hasn't come and not using a fight – the tech lobbies are hard at work.
“Play is about brain development,” Haidt told Couric on the panel. “When animals are deprived of play in early childhood, they’re rather more anxious in maturity.”
There's even a discount in actual boredom – those moments spent looking the window during a automobile ride or staring aimlessly ahead while waiting in a queue. These moments gave the brain time to rest and have now been replaced by scrolling on tablets and smartphones.
Amy Neville, Community Manager of The Parents' Network and President of the Alexander Neville Foundation, participated within the panel. She lost her son Alexander to an overdose and is suing Snapchat to offer access to drug dealers to her son.
“I quickly realized that families everywhere in the United States were waking up to seek out their children dead of their bedrooms because they’d bought pills on Snapchat,” she said. Her lawsuit is moving forward. “I feel prefer it’s a fight to the death,” she said. “I’m able to go there.”
Another mother, Kirsten, took the stage. She is the mother of the young girl Katie, who sat within the previous panel. She said she thought she was doing the whole lot right – checking her daughter's phone every night and putting it away before she went to sleep. Despite this, Katie ended up within the hospital with an eating disorder.
Kirsten went through the text messages and search history. Then someone sent her an article about how TikTok was doing Content about eating disorders in young girls.
“My husband and I didn’t know in regards to the For You site,” she said. “It wasn’t the content my daughter was on the lookout for, it was the content that kept coming to her.”
The consensus of this committee was – as with each events – more motion.
Throughout the event, people called for more legislative motion, more accountability from tech platforms, more speeches, and more people coming together to attract boundaries between themselves and social media. Even if harm is supposed to fill the current, hope stays close.
“We can and can construct the movement that every one families and all children deserve,” Meghan said on the gala. “We know that when parents come together, when communities unite, ripples are made. We've seen it occur and we're watching it grow.”
