New Zealand proposes Online Safety Bill with platform accountability regime

The New Zealand government has tabled the Online Safety Bill, which creates a statutory duty-of-care framework requiring digital platforms to identify, assess and mitigate risks of harm to users, with child sexual exploitation among the priority categories. An Online Safety Commissioner will oversee compliance, enforce transparency reporting and hold powers to levy penalties against services that fail to implement adequate safeguards. The Bill embeds safety-by-design principles, obliging platforms to consider harm prevention at the product-development stage and to deploy proactive moderation technologies where risks are identified.

Duty-of-care obligations are met not by removing access but by intervening when harm occurs, and that intervention must be both rapid and targeted to the nature of the threat. Detecting grooming or sextortion as a conversation unfolds allows a platform, parent or safeguarding team to act before abuse is completed, rather than discovering evidence only in retrospect. Guardii operates across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and Roblox, applying pattern-recognition modules that flag coercion, escalation and image solicitation in real time and surface a child in crisis without requiring humans to read every exchange. Backed by Startmate and recognised as a Meta Business Partner, the platform provides institutions and platforms with a tool that addresses regulatory expectations for proactive harm reduction while preserving user privacy.