This week, Piers Morgan doubled down on his usual attack on Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, calling them hypocrites over the limited photos of Princess Lilibet released for her fifth birthday. Speaking to Woman & Home as well as The Royals Uncensored, Morgan stated that the couple prattle on about the dangers of social media for children and their family, yet release “immediately recognisable” photos of their 5-year-old to “billions.”
Calling the photographs sickening, Morgan asked how anyone could believe anything that the couple said. The charge of being a hypocrite is familiar, emotionally driven, and factually inaccurate.
The actual advocacy of the Sussexes has been concerned about the specific harms associated with social media platforms, such as addictive algorithms, cyber bullying and predatory data mining, or the inability for parents to gain any access to information if a child has been hurt online. Harry himself suggests that “the most simplest protection is probably to not have children on those devices.” This appears to be an argument aimed at “Big Tech” or the practice of parents marking family celebrations with a few choice images.
Photographs of Lilibet’s fifth birthday, posted on 4 June 2026, appear to show two photographs, not showing her face clearly. This seems to have been the established precedent that the couple follow; not showing their children’s faces clearly. This is the exact opposite of “unrestricted publicity.” It’s a category error to equate photographs of the two of them controlled by parental will with the systemic dangers of platform abuse.
Royalty and the press are no stranger to controlling the images children appear in as part of a greater image. For years, their children have had their photographs released through controlled means. This family continue to release full photographs of their three children regularly on Instagram.
What is normal and acceptable is not necessarily being applied to the Sussexes as private people.
By posting photographs with the faces of their children largely hidden, they are certainly adopting even greater control over how much they expose their children to the public eye, not less. This part of Piers Morgan’s assertion really doesn’t stand up.
I’ve witnessed this on multiple occasions, with Piers Morgan. He resigned from Good Morning Britain when he said he didn’t believe Meghan Markle’s claims. He has addressed the subject of the Duchess as frequently and on every possible occasion. This doesn’t mean that anything he has ever said is untrue but it means that you as a reader have to ascertain if the recent claim is based on fact and logical reasoning or a sustained personality driven campaign against two people in the public eye. It’s hard to get beyond these kinds of insults when there doesn’t seem to be an equally applied standard.
Harry, at least, did have a very unhappy childhood filled with intense press pressure which even had a tragic consequence that may well be part of his thinking. The fact that the couple have stepped down as senior Royals and later have chosen to release curated images on their own terms represents more of a step towards the privacy they say they lack as opposed to further exposing them to uncontrolled paparazzi shots. Using the children as a rhetorical device when discussing whether they will visit the UK may raise temperatures but offers nothing useful whatsoever, security is now handled by professionals and is managed externally, not via Instagram captions.
The truth is that public figures raise very valid dilemmas regarding the exposure of their children. Extreme secrecy; a position which some adopt, can be perceived as unappealing. Open and unrestricted publicity is also highly problematic, however. Where Piers Morgan wants a middle ground, where he is okay for the children of certain public figures to be visible on their social media platforms but not those of others, the Sussexes have tried to walk the line between. Their advocacy on “Big Tech” and platform misuse are not mutually exclusive from a desire to protect their children.
Piers Morgan is certainly entitled to disapprove of the Sussexes and that doesn’t make everything he says untrue; but he’s not entitled to redefine a belief about “algorithmic harm” and a preference for “a more cautious approach” as some kind of blanket prohibition against parents sharing photographs of their own children, and therefore claim that the Harry and Maghan Markle are hypocrites for not abiding by his fictitious test.
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