On Wednesday morning, Meghan Markle kicked off the new year by returning to Instagram after a nearly five-year hiatus from the social media platform. Using her new account, @meghan, the Duchess of Sussex posted a short video taken by her husband, Prince Harry, where she traces out “2025” in the sand at a public beach near her home in Montecito. A source familiar with the matter tells Vanity Fair that Meghan’s return to the platform came following meetings with executives at Meta, Instagram’s parent company, about fostering healthier online experiences. (Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
So far, Meghan isn’t following any other accounts on the website, her comments are turned off, and her full list of followers—812,000 at press time—is hidden.
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Before Meghan joined the royal family, she had a following of roughly 3 million people on her own Instagram account, which she closed before her 2018 wedding to Harry. For about a year, she and Harry shared an account with Prince William and Kate Middleton before launching their own “Sussex Royal” feed, which netted 4.3 million followers in about a week. But in 2020, Meghan and Harry stepped back from the platform when they left their working roles in the royal family. Following a reported request from the late Queen Elizabeth II, they rebranded their charitable foundation and public presence. Eventually, they chose Archewell, a name they later applied to their production company as well.
In 2020, Meghan and Harry began speaking out about the harassment they had received on digital platforms and joined a campaign with the group Color of Change to encourage better moderation of hate speech. The couple turned their attention to digital safety again in 2024 with the launch of Archewell’s Parent Network, which offers evidence-based digital support networks for parents whose children experienced harm on social media, like bullying or drugs acquired online.
When the network went public in August, the project also emphasized that the Internet can have positive effects on young people’s lives. Still, Meghan discussed her own personal experience with abuse online in an interview with CBS’s Jane Pauley. “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,” Meghan told Pauley. “I haven’t really scraped the surface on my experience, but I do think that I would never want someone else to feel that way.”
