If you’ve been online in the past week, you’ve likely seen clips circulating from Meghan Sussex’s (née Markle) new show, With Love, Meghan. Set primarily in a sunlit Montecito kitchen, it’s an easy watch that gives viewers a peek into an unusual figure’s life. Sounds harmless, right?
Well, if you were to believe the internet, you’d think the devil had reared its ugly head as a woman named Meghan. Among the pieces of supposed “evidence” in the sham-trial against the duchess? When she repackages store-bought pretzels into relabeled smaller bags, it flies in the face of her environmentalism. She and pal Mindy Kaling are out-of-touch rich ladies who laugh at people for wearing Zara. Meghan is lying to us about her upbringing and, by the way, she barely knows how to cook. And all that cut fruit arranged into rainbows? An indulgent waste of time. It was as if those podcasters and TikTokers had been watching a totally different show.
Eventually, however, I came across some online creators who seemed to feel as I did: that however you felt about the show, or about Meghan herself (and goodness knows, she has her detractors), the online criticism was out of touch with reality. So, Meghan was putting pretzels into smaller bags—what’s wrong with a thoughtful touch for a houseguest? And she and Kaling weren’t purporting to be too good for certain brands; they were pointing out the fact that the duchess literally wears Zara. (It’s actually funny!) And regarding the fruit rainbow: Don’t we all own a cookbook with ideas that we’ll never use but are fun to look at?
People lambast the internet as an echo chamber, which it certainly is, but the other problem here relates to media and visual literacy. There is collective understanding that film critics are paid to assert strong opinions, and tend to do so within a dedicated column. Tabloid magazines have a different name and look than regular news sources. Even a celebrity gossip mill like Deuxmoi clearly states that its blind items aren’t verified, and presents them in manner visually distinct from their actual news reporting. No such textual or visual disclaimer exists for the aforementioned TikTok and Instagram creators and their wild spins.
More troubling still is why these takedowns are so ubiquitous: There is, these days, a financial incentive to go viral. Once upon a time, if someone spread gossip or lies to a tabloid, the upshot was pure personal satisfaction, maybe vengeance. (Even if they sold Page Six a photo, at least that photo was real.) But now, with the advent of things like “creator funds” for Tiktok and Instagram—and the rise of influencing as a career more broadly—virality has financial stakes. And not all output is created equal, either: study after study shows that negative, divisive, or otherwise anger-stoking content is more likely to be shared…and therefore go viral.
