The government says social media is harming young people, but the proposed ban faces opposition before it can become law
You watch your kids stare at screens for hours, scrolling through feeds that seem designed to keep them anxious and hooked. You want to stop it. But when a government tries to step in and ban the apps entirely, the political fight gets messy very quickly.
New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon is taking a hard line. He introduced a bill to ban social media for anyone under 16. If tech companies do not verify ages using facial recognition or digital IDs, they could face fines of up to 10% of their entire global revenue.
Luxon says the damage to young minds is already too deep.
“We simply cannot accept the harm being done to a generation of New Zealand children,” he said in a statement. He pointed out the addictive technology and the heavy pressure it puts on kids who are simply not equipped to handle it.
He knows kids will try to sneak around the rules.
“I won’t pretend that it will be simple or that it will be perfect,” Luxon admitted at a public event. “We won’t get every single child off social media. Some will always find ways around it, but frankly, it’s just way too important not to at least try.”
But getting the bill through Parliament is going to be a fight. Luxon’s own coalition partner, the New Zealand First party, is already pushing back hard.
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Winston Peters, the party leader and the country’s foreign minister, looked at Australia, which passed a nearly identical ban late last year, and did not like what he saw. He called the Australian law a “colossal failure” and argued that keeping kids off the internet is the parents’ job, not the government’s.
“We have been concerned with the proposed legislation and the direction and slippery slope that legislation like this will inevitably take our country,” Peters wrote online.
Australia already tried blocking kids from YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok. Now New Zealand is trying to figure out if a heavy-handed legal ban actually protects kids, or if it just drives them to hidden corners of the web while the politicians argue over whose job it is to raise them.
