Inside Meghan Markle’s Complicated Relationship with Social Media as She Makes Surprise Return to Instagram

Meghan Markle’s 2025 began with a surprise return to Instagram — an attempt to add light to social media, which has proven to be a dark space for the Duchess of Sussex in the past.

Though Meghan, 43, had teased a return to Instagram in the past — specifically in an August 2022 interview with The Cut — her return didn’t occur until over two years later. On Jan. 1, under the handle @meghan (which had been long rumored to belong to her), Meghan made her first post, a video of her frolicking on a beach nearby her Montecito, California home that was shot by her husband, Prince Harry. Wearing all white in the video, Meghan writes “2025” in the sand before running off camera.

Related: Meghan Markle Kicks Off 2025 by Rejoining Instagram in a Video Shot by Prince Harry!

Her most recent post, this one on Jan. 2, teases her new Netflix show, called With Love, Meghan: “I have been so excited to share this with you!” she wrote. “I hope you love the show as much as I loved making it. Wishing you all a fantastic new year! Thanks to our amazing crew and the team @netflix. Beyond grateful for the support — and fun!” She signed off, “As ever, Meghan.”

PEOPLE understands that Meghan is excited to return to media as a way to reconnect with communities around the world and share updates on the projects she’s working on. Her approach is a joyful and thoughtful one, one that inspires positivity and one that follows conversations with senior executives at Meta about creating safer and healthier online environments.

Through their work with The Archewell Foundation, both Harry, 40, and Meghan have championed efforts to create a more compassionate digital world, and PEOPLE understands Meghan hopes to lead by example in her Instagram return for fostering a safer, more positive online experience.

Meghan has spoken with aplomb about the dangers of social media in the past, including during a 2020 conversation on the Teenager Therapy podcast, where she spoke about the “almost unsurvivable” abuse she received online.

“I’m told that, in 2019, I was the most trolled person in the entire world, male or female,” she said on the show, per Deadline. “Now, eight months of that I wasn’t even visible. I was on maternity leave or with a baby.”

“But what was able to just be manufactured and churned out, it’s almost unsurvivable,” she added. “That’s so big — you can’t think of what that feels like.”

Prior to meeting and marrying Prince Harry, Meghan had a robust Instagram presence, amassing 3 million followers on her personal account. (As of Jan. 2, Meghan’s new account had 854,000 followers and counting.) After shutting down her popular blog, The Tig, in April 2017, she closed her Instagram account in January 2018, four months before marrying Harry.

“It was a big adjustment — a huge adjustment to go from that kind of autonomy to a different life,” she later told The Cut.

“Ms. Markle is grateful to everyone who followed her social media accounts over the years,” a source said in 2018. “However, as she has not used them [the accounts] for some time, she has taken the decision to close them.”

After marrying Harry, the couple’s social media presence was filtered through the @KensingtonRoyal accounts shared at the time with Prince William and Kate Middleton — but it wasn’t an autonomous social media presence.

“There’s literally a structure by which if you want to release photos of your child, as a member of the family, you first have to give them to the Royal Rota,” Meghan told The Cut, referring to the U.K.’s media pool.

In April 2019, as one of the first steps Harry and Meghan took in establishing a separate office from William and Kate, the Sussexes launched their own Instagram page, @SussexRoyal, which The Cut reported drew over 1 million followers in six hours.

PEOPLE previously noted that Meghan appeared to be behind the @SussexRoyal Instagram page, specifically because of the American spelling of certain words, use of emojis and other personal touches. This was seemingly confirmed in Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand’s book Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family, where the book claimed that “Meghan drafted a lot of the posts herself in the early days,” and that doing so was “one of the things that kept her occupied during the final days of pregnancy” with son Prince Archie, who was born in May 2019, one month after the account debuted.

The book also added that Harry and Meghan were involved in selecting the blue background used in many of their posts, as well as the decision to add a white border to photos.

Scobie and Durand pointed to one of Harry and Meghan’s “core frustrations” as part of the royal family was the “inability to speak for themselves”: “Launching the account was a somewhat liberating experience for Meghan,” according to an anonymous aide. “Not having a platform of her own to talk directly to the public was one of the toughest challenges for her, especially after building so much of her own brand on Instagram and her blog. @SussexRoyal meant that she finally had a place to curate.”

But on March 30, 2020 — just under three months after their step back as working members of the royal family was announced that January 8 — the couple quit Instagram one day before officially ending their working royal roles. Although the accounts remain inactive, a spokesperson for the couple stated at the time that the Instagram account would remain “in existence online for the foreseeable future.” (As of Jan. 2, the couple’s 214 posts are still accessible.)

The couple’s final Instagram post read, “As we can all feel, the world at this moment seems extraordinarily fragile. Yet we are confident that every human being has the potential and opportunity to make a difference — as seen now across the globe, in our families, our communities and those on the front line — together we can lift each other up to realise the fullness of that promise.”

“What’s most important right now is the health and wellbeing of everyone across the globe and finding solutions for the many issues that have presented themselves as a result of this pandemic,” it continued. “As we all find the part we are to play in this global shift and changing of habits, we are focusing this new chapter to understand how we can best contribute. While you may not see us here, the work continues.”

It concluded, “Thank you to this community — for the support, the inspiration and the shared commitment to the good in the world. We look forward to reconnecting with you soon. You’ve been great! Until then, please take good care of yourselves, and of one another.”

Related: Prince Harry Denies Reports That He and Meghan Markle 'Quit' Social Media — and Talks About Return

Then, in August 2022, Meghan told The Cut, “Do you want to know a secret? I’m getting back … on Instagram.”

By the end of the interview, Meghan “would relay she was no longer sure she would actually return to Instagram” — though it turns out the @meghan account was already created by press time of the interview, having been in existence since June 2022.

Harry himself said in a 2021 interview with Fast Company that he didn’t believe his and Meghan’s days on social media were done for good: “Social media can offer a means of connecting and community, which are vital to us as human beings,” Harry said. “We need to hear each other’s stories and be able to share our own. That’s part of the beauty of life.”

“We will revisit social media when it feels right for us — perhaps when we see more meaningful commitments to change or reform,” he continued. “But right now we’ve thrown much of our energy into learning about this space and how we can help.”

Much of Harry and Meghan’s work has revolved around social media toxicity and safety, including the creation of The Parents Network and Meghan’s backing — alongside Oprah Winfrey and Melinda French Gates — of Social Media U, an educational initiative aiming to “equip girls with the essential tools to thrive in the digital age while fostering healthier, more balanced relationships with technology,” a statement from The Archewell Foundation said last October.

In November 2021, while speaking at The New York Times DealBook Online Summit, Meghan offered up the idea of adding a “dislike” button on social media platforms, saying “One of the things that seems like such an easy solve from my lens, if you look at Instagram for example, there’s a ‘like’ button and then there’s comments. So if you disagree with something, you have to comment on it in a really vitriolic way. If there was a ‘dislike’ button, wouldn’t that hugely shift what you were putting out there? Because you could just ‘like’ it or ‘dislike’ it.”

“Now you have to ‘like’ it or say something negative,” she continued. “It is just adding to this really unfortunate cycle that I think is having an unfortunate effect on women across the world.”

Meghan has spoken many times over the years of keeping her distance from social media, saying at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summit in 2020, “For my own self-preservation, I have not been on social media for a very long time. I had a personal account years ago, which I closed down and then we had one through the institution and our office that was in the U.K. that wasn’t managed by us —that was a whole team — and so I think that comes with the territory for the job you have.”

“I made a personal choice to not have any account, so I don’t know what’s out there, and in many ways that’s helpful for me,” she added.

In March 2024, Meghan said she keeps her “distance” from social media “right now, just for my own wellbeing” during a panel discussion at the SXSW Conference in Austin, Texas, adding that “the bulk of the bullying and abuse that I was experiencing on social media and online” happened when she was pregnant with Prince Archie, now 5, and Princess Lilibet, now 3.

“You just think about that, and to really wrap your head around why people would be so hateful,” she said. “It’s not catty, it’s cruel. And why you would do that, certainly, when you’re pregnant, with a newborn, we all know as moms, it’s such a tender and sacred time.”

"I think you know, you could either succumb to it, nearly succumb to how painful that it is, and maybe in some regards, because I was pregnant, that mammalian instinct just kicked in, you do everything you can to protect your child, and as a result, protect yourself too,” Meghan continued, adding she found it “disturbing” how “much of the hate it women completely spewing it to other women.”

“I cannot make sense of that,” she continued, adding that “very, very inciting comments and conspiracy theories” are capable of having “a tremendously negative effect on someone’s mental health, on their physical safety.”

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In August, she told Jane Pauley for an episode of CBS Sunday Morning that aired on her birthday about her online bullying experience, “When you've been through any level of pain or trauma, I believe part of our healing journey — certainly part of mine — is being able to be really open about it.”

“So as we can see what's happening in the online space, we know that there's a lot of work to be done there, and we're just happy to be able to be a part of change for good,” Meghan continued.

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