New Zealand government revives bill to ban under-16s from Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat

New Zealand's government introduced legislation on Monday that would bar children under 16 from creating accounts on Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and YouTube, reviving and toughening a stalled push to make the country one of the first in the world to follow Australia in legally locking young teenagers out of the biggest social platforms.

The Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill, tabled by Education Minister Erica Stanford and championed publicly by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, would require "high-risk" platforms to take reasonable steps to confirm a user is over 16 — drawing on existing account data, facial age-estimation software, digital identity services or formal identification — or face fines of up to 10 percent of their global revenue. A new online safety regulator housed inside the Department of Internal Affairs would investigate complaints and enforce the law.

The numbers

The government's case rests on how much time teenagers already spend online: officials say one in three New Zealanders aged 13 to 17 spends at least five hours a day on social media. Public appetite for a crackdown has been building for more than a year — a June 2025 RNZ-Reid Research poll found 57.8 percent of respondents backed a ban, and an October 2025 Ipsos Education Monitor put support for restricting under-14s at 72 percent. The penalty regime mirrors the toughest end of comparable overseas laws, exposing Meta, ByteDance's TikTok and Snap to fines calculated as a share of worldwide, not just local, revenue. New Zealand's move comes eight months after neighboring Australia became the first country to enforce a nationwide under-16 social media ban, in December 2025.

How the bill got here

The proposal has a longer history than Monday's announcement suggests. A version of the ban was first introduced in May 2025 as a member's bill by National MP Catherine Wedd, was drawn from the parliamentary ballot that October, and went through a select committee inquiry before the government confirmed in May 2026 that work had been paused. That pause followed warnings from New Zealand's Privacy Commissioner, Michael Webster, that mandatory digital-ID checks could create privacy risks and that facial age-estimation tools still carry high error rates. The bill introduced this week is a considerably more detailed, government-sponsored version of that earlier proposal, complete with a standing regulator and an annual reporting regime — reflecting, officials say, lessons drawn from how Australia's own rollout unfolded.

The bill applies to "high-risk" platforms, a category the government has explicitly named as Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and YouTube. Messaging, email and voice-or-video-calling services are carved out, as are AI chatbots used mainly for answering questions, along with Spotify, Roblox and LinkedIn. Covered platforms would have to complete a written child safety risk assessment every year for all New Zealand users under 18, covering exposure to illegal and harmful content, targeted advertising, profiling and addictive design features, and to report publicly on how those risks are being reduced. Officials have published an illustrative example of how the layered age checks might work in practice: a 14-year-old attempting to sign up is first screened by facial-estimation software, then by an analysis of device and account activity, and finally, if doubt remains, by a check against mobile-provider records — with the account deactivated once the platform is satisfied the user is underage.

A fight even inside the government

Luxon framed the bill as an overdue response to industry inaction.

"We can no longer sit back and just wait for the big tech companies to fix this on their own. They've had years to act and they haven't."

Stanford stressed that families, not children, would bear no legal risk under the bill, saying "no penalties are proposed for children, their parents or caregivers" — enforcement falls solely on the platforms. But the bill's own coalition partners broke with the government within hours of the announcement. ACT leader David Seymour, whose party will use its "agree to disagree" provision to vote against the bill, argued the design is unworkable: "The ban they propose won't work, and the side effects will leave us worse off," he said, warning that any age-check regime is either strict enough to snag adults, as a similar French proposal was rejected for doing, or loose enough to leave most teenagers using the apps anyway, as critics say has happened in Australia. New Zealand First leader Winston Peters was more pointed, telling reporters, "The Government is not moving to ban under-16s from social media. The National Party is," and calling Australia's ban a "colossal failure" his party would not help repeat. The Green Party separately dismissed the approach as "unworkable" and a threat to online privacy that lets platforms off lightly on accountability.

What happens next

With both ACT and New Zealand First opposed, National needs Labour's votes to pass the bill, and the opposition party has so far withheld support while pressing the government with dozens of written questions about enforcement and privacy safeguards. Parliament has only 11 sitting days left before it rises ahead of the November 7 general election, and Luxon has acknowledged the bill will not reach its first reading, let alone take effect, before voters go to the polls — meaning its fate now depends on the outcome of that election and on whether Labour can be won over afterward. Officials have set an internal goal of having the new regulator operating by the end of 2027 if the legislation eventually proceeds. Meta, TikTok and Snap have not issued statements specific to New Zealand's bill, but all three said when Australia's ban took effect that they doubted it would meaningfully protect young people even as they moved to deactivate underage accounts to comply — a tension likely to define New Zealand's debate as well, with independent researchers still years away from a full assessment of whether Australia's law has changed how teenagers actually behave online.