New Zealand Law Commission recommends age verification and stronger platform duties in online safety review

New Zealand's Law Commission has delivered its final report on online safety regulation, recommending the creation of a dedicated regulator with powers to enforce codes of practice on harmful content and the introduction of age-verification requirements for platforms hosting adult or high-risk material. The report also proposes duties of care for services likely to be accessed by children, including proactive measures to identify and remove illegal content such as child sexual abuse material and to mitigate risks of grooming, sextortion and cyberbullying.

Age verification at the point of account creation can restrict access to designated spaces, but it does not assess the nature of contact once a young person is inside a permitted environment, nor does it prevent an adult from initiating harmful contact on a general-access platform through a compliant account. Guardii's approach focuses on the conversation itself: its grooming, sextortion, CSAM, cyberbullying and age-inappropriate-contact detection modules analyze behavioral and content signals in real time within direct messages on Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other services, blocking or flagging predatory exchanges as they escalate and surfacing the risk to a parent, school or law enforcement contact, so that duty-of-care obligations are met through early intervention rather than reactive content removal after harm has occurred.