The land of the long white cloud and Lord of the Rings backdrop, New Zealand, wants to ban under-16s from social media and AI companion services.
New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has introduced legislation to keep children under 16 off social media platforms and AI companion services. The government says the same sort of protections children get in the physical world should apply when they are being nudged, tracked and emotionally buttered up online.
“We have protections to keep children safe in the real world, and we need them in the virtual world too,” said Luxon in announcing the bill.
According to the Jurist the Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill would require an age restriction on platforms with harmful features for children. These features include recommender systems, endless feeds, feedback features and time-limited features. The bill also seeks to restrict underage users’ access to AI companion services. However, it excludes messaging apps, professional networking sites, gaming and music platforms, and other educational and health tools.
Messaging, professional networking, gaming, music, education and health tools are excluded, which should spare the bill from the usual industry wailing that regulators want to delete the entire internet.
According to the proposed law, platforms cannot simply rely on children typing in a fake birthday or waving formal identification at the screen. It requires platforms to verify users’ ages through methods such as facial scans and user activity patterns. This means that everyone who signs on, child or adult, will have to provide all their age details.
Facial scans and user activity patterns may be harder to game, but they bring their own privacy problems, and no one should pretend that more data collection automatically means child safety. The bill would require platforms to conduct child safety risk assessments for all users under 18. It would also require them to protect those users from harmful content, including bullying, violence and sexually explicit material.
This makes New Zealand’s proposal broader than a simple under-16 ban. It would push platforms to assess risks for older teenagers too, which means the social media crowd cannot just put up a velvet rope at 16 and call it sorted.
Luxon wants platforms to prove they can make their systems safe for children before they gain access, rather than leaving parents to battle recommender engines with crossed fingers and screen-time nags. The tech industry will almost certainly mutter about verification costs, privacy, enforcement and teenagers finding workarounds. Some of that will be true, but it does not magic away the problem of services built to maximise attention from users who are still developing the machinery to resist them.
