Overview
- On Monday, Aug. 24, 2026, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s National Party introduced the Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill to bar children under 16 from major social media services.
- The proposal would require platforms to take 'reasonable steps' to verify users’ ages using existing account data, facial age‑estimation tools, digital ID services or formal ID and would exempt messaging apps, online games and some AI productivity tools.
- Tech companies that fail to comply could face fines up to 10 percent of their global revenue and new duties to assess and report risks to users under 18, with an online safety regulator proposed inside the Department of Internal Affairs.
- The bill lacks support from key coalition partners NZ First and ACT and is unlikely to clear Parliament before it dissolves for the November election, so passage would depend on post‑election alignments or opposition votes.
- Policymakers and advocates say age checks raise practical, privacy and circumvention problems given evidence from Australia that bans produced limited drops in teen use and that verification methods can be error‑prone or bypassed; Pakistan’s Punjab Assembly has separately recommended similar federal action as part of the wider global trend.