MP seeking under-16 ban on social media welcomes ‘broader’ inquiry

Monday, 30 June 2025

Facebook is one of the platforms that could be affected by a youth ban on social media accounts.

The MP championing a ban on children setting up social media accounts says work on the proposal is continuing, despite a decision by Parliament’s Education and Workforce select committee to set up a parallel inquiry into the harm faced by young people by social media.

National Party MP Catherine Wedd has drafted a private member’s bill intended to prevent social media firms allowing people aged under 16 to set up accounts.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has signalled his own sympathy for such a change to protect vulnerable children from “harmful content, cyber-bullying and exploitation”.

But the ACT Party has voiced strong doubts, with senior MP Parmjeet Parmar calling instead for the select committee inquiry.

“We are now in a much better place on this issue than we were seven weeks ago,” she said.

National’s Catherine Wedd said she welcomed an inquiry into a proposed social media ban.

“Instead of rushing into a knee-jerk reaction to any harms young people face from online activity, we are now in a position to collect all the evidence and have an informed conversation about the best way to move forward.”

The Education and Workforce select committee will invite submissions and is due to complete its report by the end of November.

But Wedd indicated she did not see the inquiry as a setback for her own initiative.

“I welcome the select committee inquiry which is a broader inquiry than my focus, which has been on restricting social media for under-16s,” she said.

Wedd said her private members’ bill remained in the ballot and she was continuing to work with Education Minister Erica Stanford to explore options for legislation “so these can be brought to Cabinet for consideration”.

One of the key objections to a ban is that it could be difficult to implement without requiring people to provide valuable and personal information on their actual identities to social media firms, proving they were over 16.

The preliminary results of a study conducted on behalf of the Australian government — which plans to pioneer what would be a similar but world-first ban by December – indicated that need not be a show-stopper.

Tony Allen, the director of the Australian study, said last week its analysis of age assurance systems demonstrated they could be “private, robust and effective”.

Details of its Age Assurance Technology Trial appear sketchy, however.

Australia’s ABC broadcaster noted the company that conducted it, KLR, had yet to provide full details the actual tests it had undertaken.

The study appears to have considered using a third party to verify people’s ages, along with the option of attempting to estimate people’s ages from biological data such as photographs and behavioural information that a social media platform might have access to, but to have been cool on options that revolved around parental consent.