New Zealand Proposes Online Safety Code Requiring Platforms to Tackle Child Exploitation Content

New Zealand's Department of Internal Affairs released on 27 August 2024 a draft online safety code for public consultation that would require digital platforms to take proactive measures to prevent the hosting and distribution of child sexual exploitation material. The proposed code, developed under the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act, mandates risk assessments, user reporting mechanisms, and the deployment of detection tools capable of identifying known and previously unseen CSAM. Platforms deemed high-risk would face additional obligations including transparency reporting, independent audits of content-moderation systems, and cooperation with the Department's censorship compliance unit and police in removing illegal material and preserving evidence for prosecution.

Mandatory risk-assessment and content-moderation frameworks address publication and distribution but may not reach the conversational environments in which abuse is initiated and coordinated. Detection deployed at the direct-messaging layer, such as Guardii's real-time monitoring across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms, intercepts grooming and sextortion behavior as it unfolds, identifies CSAM including AI-generated imagery at the point of transmission, and enables immediate escalation to the appropriate authority before material is hosted or distributed at scale. This approach provides an operational complement to platform-level moderation by targeting the interpersonal exchanges that precede and facilitate publication, compressing response time and preserving evidence chains for investigative use.