You might have wondered why I was so opposed to the push to simply make under-16s drop their mobile devices and ban them from social media.
It wasn’t because I think social media is harmless.
Quite the contrary.
My concern was that politicians were reaching for what looked like the easiest political answer before we had properly asked the harder question: what should we require the technology companies themselves to change?
That distinction matters even more this week.
I have been following the major litigation against Meta in the United States closely, believing there was a reasonable prospect the company would eventually settle rather than risk allowing the case to run its full course.
That is exactly what has now happened.
Meta has reached a landmark settlement with US states over allegations involving harms to children and teenagers using Facebook and Instagram. The settlement does not amount to an admission of wrongdoing, but its significance lies in what Meta has agreed to change.
And those changes should be compulsory reading for every New Zealand politician currently talking about banning social media for under-16s.
Look at what Meta has agreed to do
The settlement goes considerably further than simply telling parents to take phones away from their kids.
Among the safeguards are daily usage limits for teenagers, restrictions on nighttime use, limits on notifications during school hours, stronger parental controls and enhanced age-assurance measures. Independent monitoring is also part of the settlement arrangements.
Think about what that means.
For years, much of the debate has placed the burden on children and parents.
Spend less time online.
Take the phone away.
Watch what your kids are doing.
Don’t let them create an account.
But the American settlement starts moving responsibility in another direction.
It asks what responsibility belongs to the company that designed the platform.
That is where I believe New Zealand’s debate needs to go.
Protect the child — but regulate the product
If we believe certain features are contributing to harm, why aren’t we regulating those features?
If endless scrolling is a problem, examine design requirements around it.
If teenagers are staying online throughout the night, consider mandatory nighttime restrictions.
If algorithms are serving increasingly harmful material to vulnerable young people, regulate the algorithms and recommendation systems.
If children below a platform’s minimum age are accessing it, impose meaningful age-assurance obligations on the company.
If parents need greater visibility and control, mandate the tools necessary to provide it.
And if platforms repeatedly fail to comply, make the penalties large enough that they cannot simply be absorbed as another cost of doing business.
That is a much more sophisticated conversation than ban the kids.
Australia has now given us another experiment to study
Across the Tasman, Australia has already gone much further down the age-restriction road.
Since December 2025, designated social-media platforms have been required to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 from holding accounts. Importantly, the penalties fall on the platforms, not children or their parents, and companies can face penalties of up to A$54.6 million for systemic non-compliance.
Australia has therefore given New Zealand something incredibly valuable: real-world evidence.
We don’t have to speculate about every aspect of how an under-16 regime might operate.
We can examine what worked.
What didn’t.
How children circumvented the rules.
How accurately age assurance operated.
What happened to privacy.
Whether young people migrated to other platforms.
Whether harmful behaviours reduced or simply moved elsewhere.
And whether the legislation actually made children safer.
Australia’s regulator reported that platforms had removed access to 4.7 million under-16 accounts by mid-December 2025, while subsequent implementation has included scrutiny of whether platforms are adequately preventing workarounds.
But there is also a warning here.
Age assurance can potentially involve analysing signals ranging from account behaviour and connections through to images, audio, device information and location data. That immediately creates legitimate questions about privacy and how much information everyone else may have to surrender simply to prove they are old enough to use a service.
That is precisely why we should not rush this.
New Zealand has an opportunity to do something better
We now have three things we did not have when this debate began.
We have the Australian experience.
We have the American litigation and Meta settlement.
And we have a growing international body of evidence about age assurance, platform design and children’s online safety.
So use it.
Instead of turning this into another election-year contest where political parties compete over who can announce the toughest ban, establish a cross-party Online Safety Working Group.
Bring National, Labour, the Greens, ACT, New Zealand First and Te Pāti Māori around the same table.
But don’t stop with politicians.
Bring in the Privacy Commissioner, online-safety experts, children’s advocates, mental-health experts, educators, Māori experts, technology specialists, parents and — critically — rangatahi themselves.
Then give that group a defined job.
Study the Australian implementation.
Examine the Meta settlement and other international regulatory developments.
Determine which platform-design protections could sensibly be mandated here.
Develop robust privacy safeguards around age assurance.
Establish appropriate parental controls and protections for children.
Determine what transparency should be required around algorithms and recommendation systems.
Set penalties for companies that refuse to comply.
And produce agreed drafting instructions and a timetable for legislation.
Do it once and do it properly
There is another reason for taking this approach.
Badly drafted technology law ages incredibly quickly.
Technology moves faster than Parliament, and poorly designed legislation can create loopholes, unintended consequences and years of litigation over what lawmakers actually meant.
New Zealand should be aiming for higher-quality legislation, not legislation designed primarily to generate a campaign headline.
A cross-party process would establish agreed reference points, definitions, evidence and timelines before the drafting begins.
It would also give any new regulatory regime a much better chance of surviving changes of government.
Because children’s online safety should not reverse direction every three years depending on which parties occupy the Beehive.
This was never about defending Meta
That is the point I want to make clear.
My opposition to an immediate blanket ban was never an argument for leaving children exposed to social-media harm.
It was almost the opposite.
I don’t think banning children from platforms is enough.
Because if the product itself contains harmful design features, those features remain there waiting for them on their 16th birthday.
If the algorithms are the problem, regulate the algorithms.
If addictive design is the problem, regulate the design.
If inadequate age assurance is the problem, establish a safe and privacy-conscious standard.
If companies know children are being harmed but fail to respond, create consequences.
And yes, if the evidence eventually demonstrates that age restrictions should form part of that framework, then legislate them.
But make them one component of a comprehensive online-safety regime rather than pretending an arbitrary birthday solves everything.
The developments in the United States have changed this debate.
Australia has given us lessons to study.
New Zealand now has an opportunity to take the best of both, learn from their mistakes and build something better.
Protecting our tamariki and rangatahi is absolutely the responsibility of parents, whānau and communities.
But it is also the responsibility of the billion-dollar corporations designing the digital environments our children inhabit.
Let’s stop pretending those two responsibilities are the same size.
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