New Zealand Law Commission recommends age verification for social media and online pornography

The New Zealand Law Commission released a report on 5 November 2024 recommending that the government introduce age verification requirements for social media platforms and online pornography sites to prevent children under 16 from accessing age-restricted content. The Commission's proposals include a regulatory framework requiring platforms to verify user age using methods that balance privacy and effectiveness, with oversight by a designated regulator and penalties for non-compliance, while acknowledging that no verification system is foolproof and that implementation will require careful design to avoid displacing young people to unregulated services.

Age verification gates determine who can enter a platform but do not detect or prevent the harm that occurs inside, and they impose a privacy cost on every user including adults while offering no protection to the child who bypasses the gate or the one who is targeted on a service that does not verify. Guardii operates where abuse happens: in the private message thread where a predator escalates contact, a sextortionist applies coercion, or a peer sustains bullying, identifying those harmful patterns in real time across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and other platforms and blocking the hostile contact before it reaches the child, a point-of-harm intervention that protects without requiring universal age verification or restricting access for the supervised adolescent.