You Can't Hate a Celebrity Into Irrelevance.

The avalanche

Consider what actually happened this month. A man decided not to bring his children on a work trip. That's the event. Prince Harry is due in the UK next week; over a dispute about police protection, his wife and kids won't travel with him. A scheduling decision inside one family.

In the days around it, that non-event produced — across the BBC, Reuters, ABC, CBS, USA Today, People, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, the Telegraph, the Mail, the Mirror, the Express, and dozens more outlets — hundreds of separate articles. The same handful of facts refracted into "will they," "won't they," "the real reason," "what to expect," "sources say," updated hourly, pages deep. Open a news app and scroll: it doesn't end.

And here's the tell — a lot of it is exhausted. The BBC's headline: "Will they or won't they, and will we care?" The Sunday Times: "The will-they won't-they Harry and Meghan show — please make it stop." Read those again. These are outlets publishing articles that openly question why the article exists. Will we care — while betting you'll click. Please make it stop — while, demonstrably, not stopping.

That isn't hypocrisy, and it isn't a failure of willpower. It's the machine, and everyone is standing inside it — the outlets, the fans, and above all the people who share those very headlines to say "enough, why is this news." Each of them just made it news again. If demanding that something end could end it, this would have ended years ago. It doesn't work that way, and it's worth understanding why.

The machine doesn't know if you're clapping or booing

Recommendation and ranking systems — the code that decides what gets shown to more people — optimize for one thing: engagement. Clicks, replies, shares, time spent, reactions. Including the angry ones. They do not, as a rule, sort your interaction by whether you approved of the thing. A hostile quote-post, a furious comment, and an adoring repost all land in the same bucket: interaction. Interaction is the signal that tells the system to show a post to more people.

That's the load-bearing fact, and it's well established — the Knight First Amendment Institute's analysis of engagement-based ranking found these systems amplify exactly the divisive, us-versus-them content that users don't even say they prefer. The system isn't reading the room. It's counting hands.

Here's the part people get wrong, so let's be precise: this does not mean "negativity always wins." It doesn't. A large 2025 study across six countries (currently a preprint, not yet peer-reviewed) found negative news posts actually drew fewer likes and comments than non-negative ones. So the claim isn't that hate outperforms love. The claim is narrower and harder to escape: the pipe doesn't reward approval over hostility. Both convert to reach. You cannot register your disapproval through the machine without also feeding it.

Why this fight travels

If there's one kind of content the research is clear about, it's tribal content. A 2021 study of 2.7 million posts found that language about the political out-group — "them," the other side — was the single strongest predictor of sharing the researchers measured, raising the odds of a share by about 67% per word. Us-versus-them is the most shareable shape there is.

And the Sussex saga is us-versus-them in its purest form: royalists against the couple, the couple's defenders against the press, everyone against everyone. It is practically engineered to travel — not because it's negative, but because it's tribal. Every side posting to own the other side is, from the machine's point of view, the same reliable fuel.

Nobody in this is a victim — including them

Here's the anchor that keeps this honest: Harry and Meghan are not passive prey caught in the attention economy. They are among its most successful operators. Harry's memoir Spare sold 1.43 million copies on its first day — the fastest-selling nonfiction book ever recorded. Their Netflix documentary drew 81.55 million hours of viewing in its premiere week, the platform's biggest documentary debut at the time. Meghan's lifestyle brand sells out its drops. Their product, across every venture, is their own story and name — which means they convert the very attention people rage about directly into revenue.

So this cuts both ways, and fairly. Criticizing a Netflix show, or fact-checking a memoir, or covering a business deal is ordinary commentary about people who sell their story for a living — not harassment, and not proof of bad faith. The critics have a real point: if you monetize your life, your life is fair comment. But the mechanic doesn't care about the point. A sharp, legitimate critique and a lazy pile-on convert to reach identically. Everyone in the fight is being paid by the fight — the Sussexes in money, the outrage accounts in engagement, the outlets in clicks. Nobody swinging is actually trying to end the bout.

The one exit, and why it stays locked

Attention is the scarce resource. The economist Herbert Simon said it plainly back in 1971: a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. In an attention economy, relevance just is captured attention, and captured attention is money. Which means there's exactly one thing that makes a public figure genuinely irrelevant: collective disengagement. No clicks, no shares, no angry quote-posts, no "why won't they go away."

And that is the one thing an outrage economy is structurally incapable of manufacturing. Outrage is, by definition, the impulse to respond — loudly, now, in public. You cannot organize a silence out of it. Every "make them disappear" is a small deposit of the attention that keeps them here.

None of this is a scold pointed at the couple's critics. It's the trap everyone's standing in — the fan accounts, the hate accounts, the tabloids that cover the coverage, and yes, a piece like this one, which is also, unavoidably, attention. The machine metabolizes attention of every flavor. Naming that is the only real service on offer.

If you truly want a celebrity to fade, there's no clever hashtag for it, no dunk sharp enough. There's only the boring move the algorithm can't stop you from making and can't make you take: scroll past, and mean it.

Hero photograph: Office of the Governor-General of New Zealand, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.