WATCH | Meghan on staying away from social media, making the world better for Archie

Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, said on Tuesday she has no social media accounts “for her own self-preservation” and has no idea what is being said about her online.

Meghan, who with her husband Prince Harry left the UK earlier this year partly as a result of media hostility, has been campaigning for months against the effects of negative online chatter.

“For my own self-preservation, I have not been on social media for a very long time,” Meghan told Fortune magazine's Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summit.

“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. She said she closed down her personal account years ago and that her and Harry's now defunct official Sussex Royal Instagram and Twitter accounts were managed by others.

Meghan said the obsession with social media was an “addiction”, adding that “there are very few things in this world where you call the person who's engaging with it 'a user'".

The duchess also spoke of how motherhood affected the way she thought about leadership, revealing it had made her “more courageous”. 

“It makes you so concerned for the world they're going to inherit, and so the things you're able to tolerate on your own are not the same that you are going to put your child in a position of vulnerability for.

“You go every single day, how can I make this better for him? How can I make this better for Archie? And that is a shared belief between me and my husband.”

Harry and Meghan now live in Southern California after stepping down from their royal roles in March to forge a new life and finance it themselves.

Last weekend, in a podcast conversation with teens to mark World Mental Health Day, Meghan said she had been told that “in 2019 I was the most trolled person in the entire world - male or female”.