Watch: Meghan Markle announces return to social media

Instagram / Meghan

The Duchess of Sussex has announced her return to social media where she plans to “authentically share moments of joy and inspiration from her life”.

The Duchess marked the moment with a short video clip filmed by Prince Harry on a beach near their home in Montecito, California and published on Instagram.

It shows her dressed all in white as she runs into the frame, before writing “2025” in the sand and then running back in front of the camera laughing.

There is no sound apart from the wind and the waves and a short clap of the Duchess’s hands as she brushes off the sand off camera. The comments are turned off.

A source said of the brief footage: “This moment beautifully underscores the joy and positivity that defines this new chapter in their lives.”

The Duchess launched the @‌Meghan Instagram handle in the summer of 2022, but despite amassing some 117,000 followers has never used it, until now.

‘Excited to reconnect with communities around the world’

The development is believed to mark a new chapter in the Duchess’s professional life and comes ahead of the launch of American Riviera Orchard, her commercial brand.

She is said to be “excited” to return to social media and will use it as a means to “reconnect with communities around the world” as well as sharing updates on her “impactful projects”.

Before meeting Prince Harry, Meghan ran her own lifestyle blog, The Tig, and had her own private social media profiles.

The Duke described in his memoir, Spare, how she had given it all up. “She’d also shut down her website and abandoned all social media, again at the behest of the Palace comms team,” he wrote.

Since then, both the Duke and Duchess have railed against social media, warning that children are “force fed” mindless content by powerful tech companies that “refuse to change”.

Meghan, however, is said to be committed to promoting a “joyful and thoughtful” approach to online engagement that inspires positivity.

While she recognises that there is still work to be done, she is confident that by returning to Instagram, she can “lead by example” in demonstrating how it can be used for good, a source said.

Her first post is an “unfiltered” video filmed by Harry on a public beach and as such is considered “a reflection of the wonderful, supportive community” that surrounds them both.

When the Duke and Duchess created their own separate royal household in 2019, they planned to use the newly created @‌SussexRoyal handle to communicate with the public on social media.

Barely a year later, however, they left their official public roles and moved to the US, bidding farewell to their nine million followers.

Duke and Duchess plotting future direction

Since then, they have both robustly campaigned against the perils of social media, last year setting up the The Archewell Foundation Parents’ Network to support those whose children have experienced online harm.

The Duchess’s @‌Meghan handle quietly appeared on Instagram in the summer of 2022, initially with a previously unseen childhood photograph that was later switched to a pink dahlia – the symbol adopted by members of Harry and Meghan’s “Sussex Squad” of online devotees.

In an interview with The Cut magazine at around the same time, she declared: “I’m getting back on Instagram.”

Allison P Davis, the writer of the article, noted at the time that the Duchess “delivered a nothing with such gravitas”. However, the Duchess later clarified that she was “no longer sure she would actually return to Instagram”.

Her re-emergence on social media took another 18 months and will now form a critical part of her new public persona as she promotes a domestic idyll in a bid to sell a plethora of household items through American Riviera Orchard.

The Duchess’s Instagram account now features a new profile picture of her laughing in an elegant white dress.

Within an hour, her followers had jumped from 117,000 to 255,000.

Although both the Duke and Duchess once crowed about being joined at the hip, with gushing analogies about entwined palm trees and salt and pepper pots, they have more recently decided to focus on their own individual professional endeavours.

As The Telegraph revealed some time ago, these efforts will reflect their differing interests and talents as they plot their future direction and careers.