If you’ve been online in the past week, you’ve likely seen clips circulating from With Love, Meghan, the new show from Meghan Sussex (née Markle). Set primarily in a sunlit Montecito, California, 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 a relabeled smaller bag, 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, though, 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 a smaller bag—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 anonymous items aren’t verified and presents them in a manner visually distinct from its actual news reporting. No such textual or visual disclaimer exists for the aforementioned 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 and 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.
While society’s long-established appetite for tearing down powerful women certainly seems to be at play in the Meghan example, the craze around Saltburn back in 2023 helped me identify another endemic online behavior worth addressing. I like to avoid movie spoilers, but there was no escaping the onslaught of horrified reaction videos to that film, leading me to believe Saltburn would make The Talented Mr. Ripley look like a children’s movie. But when I finally watched the film for myself, I realized that these scenes—represented online as being too vile and depraved for words—just weren’t that bad, if they existed at all. Here, again, the memes had fairly little to do with the truth.
A meme in its best, most harmless form spins a nugget of reality into a joke. But what’s increasingly happening is that people are getting clout from inventing a new “reality” altogether. More often than not these spins have one end goal: to dismiss or discredit someone or something. And the danger of being dismissive is cutting off another point of view.
What ever happened to forming an opinion of your own? It might be true that Meghan’s life is difficult to relate to, but my plea is for you to get there on your own and not based off a lifted clip. Watch the TV show, see the movie, listen to the podcast, decide how you feel about it, and then see what people are saying on TikTok. As Abraham Lincoln once said, “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.”