New Zealand Moves to Bar Under-16s From Social Apps
New Zealand wants under-16s off the major social platforms. Its new Online Safety Bill puts the country on a lengthening list of governments betting that an age floor is the fix for teen social media harms.
What the bill actually does
The legislation would require what it calls high-risk platforms, naming Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and Facebook, to take reasonable steps to confirm users are over 16. Bloomberg first reported the proposal.
That phrase, "reasonable steps," is doing a lot of work. It's the same flexible standard other jurisdictions have reached for, and it hands the hard part, actually establishing how old a teenager is, straight to the platforms.
The bill also isn't close to law. It's unlikely to move until after New Zealand's general election in November, so it gets argued over in a campaign before it ever gets argued over in committee.
Australia already ran this experiment
New Zealand is following Australia, which passed the most closely watched teen social ban anywhere and now has six months of results.
They aren't encouraging. Australia's eSafety Commissioner published a six-month update earlier this month: most underage teens are still getting into social apps, there's been no measurable change in problematic online use or in teen wellbeing, and the teens who did cut back simply moved to messaging apps and online games.
That's despite real enforcement. Meta says it removed 750,000 accounts belonging to underage Australians once the rules kicked in. Hundreds of thousands of accounts gone, and the behavior the law was written to change mostly didn't.
There's a narrower positive finding in there. Logged-in use on mainstream platforms does appear to have dropped, which isn't nothing. It's just a much smaller claim than the one made when the law passed.
The two problems nobody has cracked
Substitution is the first. Teens who want to talk to each other will find somewhere to do it. Push them off Instagram and TikTok and they land in messaging apps, in games, or on smaller platforms with fewer moderators, thinner safety tooling and no public accountability. Plenty of child-safety researchers have said the destination may be worse than the place they left.
Verification is the second. Australia's rollout suggests age checks are still trivially easy to beat: type in an older birth date, get waved through. A law requiring platforms to check ages is only as good as the check, and the check is currently weak. Any serious version of this policy has to say what verification looks like in practice, and what everyone else gives up in privacy for it to work.
Where this goes
The map keeps filling in. Australia went first, several other jurisdictions are drafting or implementing versions of the same idea, and New Zealand has now added its name.
What's still missing is evidence that it works. Australia ran the thing at national scale and came back six months later with almost no movement on the outcomes that justified the law. That's precisely the sort of result that ought to shape whatever the next country writes.
New Zealand has one accidental advantage: because the bill is parked until after November, its lawmakers get to watch Australia's data mature before they vote on anything. Whether that changes the bill, or just delays a copy of it, is the part worth watching.
Image: https://kaboompics.com/, via Pexels
