Media release: We can’t just turn off the internet for those under 16

The NZ Council for Civil Liberties opposes the Social Media Age-Restricted Users Bill presented by National MP Catherine Wedd with support from Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, which would ban those under 16 from accessing social media.

The bill’s definition of social media is incredibly broad and includes any platform where the primary purpose is to “enable social interactions between 2 or more end-users”. This would include the obvious contenders such as Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter/X, YouTube, and Instagram, but also describes a large range of other sites such as Reddit, Discord, hobbyist forums, support groups, and arguably even email.

“The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act guarantees us the right to freedom of expression, the ability to seek, send and receive information, and this applies to people under the age of 16 too. They have the right to communicate with each other, their friends, and their family, and the modern reality is that they use social media to do so.” says Thomas Beagle.

“But they’re doing more than that: we’ve seen youth-led political movements such as JustSpeak, School Strike 4 Climate and the Make It 16 campaigns all use social media to organise political campaigns. This bill is a gross imposition on their rights and a terrible discouragement to just the sort of politically active people our country needs.”

The bill puts the responsibility on the platforms to determine the age of their users, and we are concerned that this might lead to New Zealanders being forced to provide identity documents and other evidence to both local and foreign platform providers, who already know far too much about us and are happy to sell that information to others. However, the bill is very light on detail with the tricky specifics to be developed in regulation (making the whole regulatory process susceptible to lobbying and corruption).

The New Zealand Council for Civil LIberties opposes this bill as unreasonable in principle and unworkable in practice and believes it should not be progressed if selected for introduction.