New Zealand joins the global push to keep under-16s off social media

New Zealand will introduce a bill requiring platforms to verify users are over 16, though two of three coalition partners oppose it and no vote will happen before November’s election. France’s under-15 ban takes effect on 1 September with its age verification mandate stripped out.

New Zealand will introduce a bill on Monday requiring social media platforms to check that users are over 16. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says penalties for non-compliance could reach 10% of a platform’s global revenue.

It is not close to becoming law. The bill will not progress before the 7 November election, and two of the three parties in Luxon’s coalition have said they will not support it.

The objection from inside the government is the interesting one. New Zealand First leader Winston Peters says no method fulfils the bill’s intent “without banning VPNs or the use of digital ID to enforce the law.”

Luxon’s counter-argument is arithmetic. He says a chief executive facing 42 countries with a similar framework pays attention in a way they would not to one small nation.

The country that went first offers thin support for that. Australia’s ban produced only a marginal fall in underage users in its first three months, and TNW’s own testing found it stumbled at the first check.

Europe is further into this than the headlines suggest. France banned under-15s from social media in July, with the rule taking effect on 1 September and a grace period to 1 January for existing accounts.

Then French lawmakers removed the part that would have made it work. The provision requiring platforms to submit age verification systems to the regulator Arcom was stripped before passage, the opposite of Norway’s plan to shift liability onto platforms.

What is left leans on Brussels. Enforcement now depends on the Digital Services Act, a supervisory architecture assembled from instruments not written for this purpose.

The European Parliament has picked a number, at least. It voted 483 to 92 in November for a harmonised digital minimum age of 16, with access from 13 by parental consent, in a resolution that is not binding on anyone.

Consensus is not universal. Estonia remains the rare EU country arguing against bans on children’s social media use.

So the pattern is now visible across four continents. The bans keep passing and the verification keeps getting cut, and a New Zealand coalition partner has said out loud what most governments are declining to answer.