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 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.”
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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.
