New Zealand is introducing legislation that would restrict social media for kids under the age of 16. According to the New Zealand Herald, the bill requiring age checks for social media platforms, which prime minister Christopher Luxon’s party tabled in parliament today, targets content sharing platforms with at least one high-risk feature, such as “endless scrolling, algorithmic recommendations, feedback features and time-limited features.” It proposes noncompliance fines of up to 10 percent of a platform’s global revenue.
The bill is now practically standard-issue, as nations around the world move to curb the negative impact social media has had on youth. It would require major social platforms to assess the risks they present and report to regulatory authorities, and to take “reasonable steps” to prevent underage users from accessing their products. It comes with the attendant confusion over how to implement effective age assurance and how to gauge proportionality, as well as the insistence from the government that it is not leading citizens down a path toward mandatory digital ID.
Luxon says users could look to “existing account information, facial age estimation, digital ID services and formal ID” for age assurance. Platforms will be required to offer multiple methods – and self-declaration cannot be one of them.
One option on the table for New Zealand is a digitized Kiwi Access Card, or 18+ card, a national ID that counts as a valid document for identity verification. The Herald quotes a briefing sent to Education Minister Erica Stanford, suggesting that “the digital card could also be used for online age verification if the Government were to introduce requirements for social media platforms to require age assurance.”
Clash of conservativisms within coalition
The New Zealand government’s bill also faces typical opposition – but in this instance, it comes from Luxon’s coalition partners in the New Zealand First party, which says it will not support the bill. Winston Peters, leader of the New Zealand First party and the country’s current foreign minister, worries about a slippery slope of online regulation, and calls Australia’s trailblazing Social Media Minimum Age act a “colossal failure.”
The bill as designed would “lead to a Soviet-era outcome that would be guaranteed to take New Zealanders’ freedoms and privacy away,” Peters says.
The rift – which could threaten the legislation and, in theory, the coalition – illustrates the intersecting political lines within the age assurance policy ecosystem. New Zealand’s Sixth National Government includes Christopher Luxon’s National Party, which leans from the right to the center, alongside more libertarian and populist positions in ACT New Zealand and New Zealand First – neither of which support the social media bill.
The Herald quotes Act leader David Seymour, who argues that “teenagers are remarkably good at getting around restrictions on the internet. Any system strong enough to reliably stop them will inevitably start asking a lot more of everybody else.”
Strength in numbers, political upswell power laws
The debate in New Zealand is making several points more explicitly evident. One is that governments know they probably cannot force Big Tech’s hand on their own, no matter how high they set their fines – but that adding momentum to the global movement could create enough consequences to trigger a true paradigm shift. Christopher Luxon recognizes this in his statement that “real power” is to be found in “acting in concert with many other countries around the world.”
Another is that calls for a digital duty of care are growing louder. New Zealand’s Green Party does not like Luxon’s legislation, but not because it is oppressive; rather, it fails to place the responsibility on social media giants, which need to fix their platforms.
Media and communications spokesperson Hūhana Lyndon says “big tech platforms must be required to provide a digital duty of care to their users, instead of focusing on profit margins.”
Related to this is the underlying unease that is growing in society about social media and what it does to us. Supported as it is by a growing body of evidence, and a growing list of court decisions, that unease is not likely to fade – and as long as it exists, it will drive political will.
The Guardian quotes Luxon, who concedes that it may take time to get it right, but that “we simply cannot accept the harm being done to a generation of New Zealand children.”
“I won’t pretend that it will be simple or that it will be perfect. We won’t get every single child off social media. Some will always find ways around it, but frankly, it’s just way too important not to at least try.”
All around the world
Reuters has published a summary of what various countries and companies are doing to regulate access to social media.
On top of familiar legislative efforts in Australia, the UK, the U.S., Europe and New Zealand, the list includes notes on work in Asia and the Middle East. It highlights China’s “minor mode” program, requiring device-level restrictions and app-specific rules to restrict screen time depending on age; calls for age restrictions on social from India’s chief economic adviser; and a resolution in the United Arab Emirates setting the minimum age for social media use at 15.
Article Topics
age verification | digital ID | facial age estimation (FAE) | legislation | New Zealand | social media
