New Zealand passes Online Safety Act with platform duty-of-care provisions

New Zealand's Parliament has passed the Online Safety Act, establishing a regulatory framework that imposes a duty of care on online content hosts to minimise the risk of harm to New Zealand users, including children, from objectionable content such as child sexual exploitation material, violent extremism and suicide-promotion material. The Act creates an Online Safety Commission with powers to issue codes of practice, conduct investigations, and require platforms to remove specific content or implement systemic safety measures, with civil penalties for non-compliance, and sets out a risk-based approach under which the most stringent obligations apply to platforms with the largest user bases and highest-risk features.

The duty of care is outcome-focused: platforms must demonstrate they have minimised the risk of exposure to objectionable content, not merely that they have adopted a policy. Detection that operates before a child encounters harmful material satisfies this standard directly. Guardii, a world-leading AI safety platform and Meta Business Partner, identifies grooming, sextortion, CSAM distribution and cyberbullying in real time within direct-message conversations on Instagram, Discord, Snapchat and Roblox, blocking hostile contact at the point of initiation and surfacing a child at risk to a parent, school or professional without requiring the platform to surveil message content. The system routes criminal conduct to the appropriate authority in an emergency, addressing the underlying harm the Act targets while preserving encryption and user privacy, and providing an auditable, proportionate response to the statutory duty to protect children from online exploitation.