PILLAR
Protecting individual life, liberty and rights
Civil liberties organisation PILLAR is urging the government to abandon its proposed ban on social media for New Zealanders under 16, warning that protecting children online must not become the justification for dramatically expanding government regulation of the internet.
PILLAR Executive Director Nathan Seiuli says the organisation shares the government’s concern about the very real harms children can encounter online, but fundamentally disagrees with the proposed solution.
There is no question that social media can expose children to serious harm. Parents are right to be concerned, and the government is right to take those concerns seriously.
But good intentions do not automatically make good law.
PILLAR is particularly concerned that enforcing an age-based social media ban risks requiring platforms to establish the age of New Zealanders accessing online services – potentially affecting millions of adults in an attempt to prevent children from accessing them.
The fundamental problem with an under-16 social media ban is enforcement. To know who is under 16, you first need a system capable of determining who everyone is.
That creates an obvious civil liberties question: how much privacy should millions of law-abiding adult New Zealanders be required to surrender in order to enforce a restriction on children?
PILLAR believes New Zealand should be extremely cautious about normalising widespread age-assurance systems, digital identity requirements, biometric verification or other mechanisms that could create infrastructure capable of tracking or restricting lawful access to the internet.
Seiuli says online safety policy must also recognise the proper distinction between the role of parents and the role of the state.
Parents should be empowered to decide when and how their children use social media. Government should give families better tools, better information and stronger protections against genuinely harmful and illegal material.
What we should not do is quietly shift responsibility from parents to a government-backed regulatory system governing who can access lawful online spaces.
PILLAR also warns against importing overseas internet regulation without properly examining its consequences for privacy, freedom of expression and the future relationship between citizens, technology companies and the state.
Once governments establish the infrastructure to verify identity, regulate access and determine which online services citizens may use, the question quickly becomes what that infrastructure will be used for next.
New Zealand should not build a digital checkpoint at the entrance to the internet and simply trust that future governments will never expand its purpose.
PILLAR instead supports a targeted approach to online harm that places responsibility as close as possible to families and focuses state intervention on clearly defined harms.
That should include stronger parental controls at the device level, improved digital resilience and online-safety education, effective tools to combat intimate-image abuse and exploitation, and targeted enforcement against illegal content and criminal behaviour.
Where age assurance is genuinely necessary – such as access to clearly defined adult-only services – it should be tightly limited, privacy-preserving and subject to strong safeguards.
We reject the false choice that says you either support this ban or you do not care about children.
We can protect children without treating every New Zealander as someone who must prove their age before participating in the digital world.
The test for any internet regulation should be simple: is it necessary, is it proportionate, does it actually work, and can it be achieved without unnecessarily restricting the rights and privacy of everyone else?
If the government cannot meet that test, it should not proceed.
PILLAR is calling on cabinet and parliament to reject a blanket under-16 social media ban and instead pursue targeted, evidence-based measures that protect children while preserving the privacy, freedom and digital rights of all New Zealanders.
