In late January, Kensington Palace finally admitted something which had been clear for months: that there was a frightening amount of online abuse directed towards the Duchess of Cambridge and Duchess of Sussex. The palace framed the issue that way, that both Kate and Meghan were being criticized equally online. As I said at the time, Kate has been criticized for years, but the volume of racism and hatred directed towards Meghan is beyond the pale. Kensington Palace basically admitted that their communications office has spent hours deleting comments on their social media accounts, and blocking or muting unhinged trolls. As many of us said at the time: the official palace social media shouldn’t even allow comments. They need to just cut off the comments on Instagram. But they aren’t doing that. Instead, KP went to Clarence House and now Clarence House is issuing “Social Media Guidelines,” which serves as adequate warning that some haters are going to be investigated or banned or worse. From Clarence House’s press release:
These guidelines are in place to help create a safe environment on all social media channels run by The Royal Family, Clarence House and Kensington Palace. The aim of our social media channels is to create an environment where our community can engage safely in debate and is free to make comments, questions and suggestions. We ask that anyone engaging with our social media channels shows courtesy, kindness and respect for all other members of our social media communities….By engaging with our social media channels you agree to follow these guidelines. Comments must not:
• Contain spam, be defamatory of any person, deceive others, be obscene, offensive, threatening, abusive, hateful, inflammatory or promote sexually explicit material or violence.
• Promote discrimination based on race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation or age.
• Breach any of the terms of any of the social media platforms themselves.
• Be off-topic, irrelevant or unintelligible.
• Contain any advertising or promote any services.Breach of guidelines: We reserve the right to determine, at our discretion, whether contributions to our social media channels breach our guidelines. We reserve the right to hide or delete comments made on our channels, as well as block users who do not follow these guidelines. We also reserve the right to send any comments we deem appropriate to law enforcement authorities for investigation as we feel necessary or is required by law.
[From the Clarence House press release]
I laughed at “Be off-topic, irrelevant or unintelligible.” They’re going to ban people for tweeting threadjacking nonsense at them! Again, I have to say… just shut down comments on Instagram entirely on all of the royal ‘grams. Twitter is always going to be a trickier beast, and I’ve seen a lot of unhinged tweets in reply to various KP tweets. I don’t have an answer for what they should do about it, but I don’t think “asking the racist hater trolls to be nice” is going to work as a long term strategy. We’ll see though – I do think it’s a good thing that Clarence House and KP are finally admitting that there’s a problem, that this isn’t just business-as-usual.
Photos courtesy of WENN.
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