TikTok, Meta warn NZ against banning under 16s from social media

Monday, 6 October 2025

TikTok is calling on the Government to tread carefully when considering banning social media for under 16s as a Parliamentary inquiry gets under way into the harm young New Zealanders encounter online.

The ACT Party initiated the inquiry, amid its worry about proposals to ban social media for young teens. National wants to advance the ban, and its MP Catherine Wedd - with the backing of the prime minister - initiated a members’ bill in May. But it will only advance if drawn from the ballot.

The platform, along with Instagram and Facebook owner Meta, submitted to Parliament’s Education and Workforce select committee today.

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While the social media giants said they had systems in place to control young people’s exposure to harmful content, National MP Grant McCallum said the problems are “still very much existing”.

In a written submission from TikTok, obtained by The Post, the company urged the committee to “exercise caution” when considering bans, saying many experts have warned it could have unintended consequences.

About 72% of adult New Zealanders agreed that children under age 14 should be banned from social media, the annual Ipsos Education Monitor has found.

Online activity among young people is at a consistently high level.

A 2022 study by a group of academics in New Zealand interviewed 3600 young people aged 14 to 20. Nearly all respondents (97%) were online several times a day, often using five or more platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok. Nearly 60% reported using social media for more than five hours a day.

The study also showed pervasive online marketing of products such as tobacco, alcohol, vaping and gambling is making its way onto young people’s phones, including those under 18.

Meta said there was considerable evidence of the benefits that young people experience online and the important role of parents and guardians in promoting their online safety.

Blanket bans would not raise the standard for age assurance, it said.

It was more effective to leverage existing investments and incentivise broader investment across the industry, it said, and urged the committee to opt for a narrowly targeted harm approach.

TikTok’s public policy lead Ella Woods-Joyce said there was evidence blunt bans did not work. “They may send young people to places on the internet that don’t have the tools that large platforms like ours have.”

Legislation that will lift safety standards was a better approach.

But where Woods-Joyce said it was the companies’ “aim” to be a safe online space, Labour MP Reuben Davidson said an aim was different to being one, and asked how far off the platform was to being “safe”.

Woods-Joyce said TikTok’s systems were effective and removed about 99% of content that violated community guidelines within 24 hours.

Woods-Joyce said industry players needed to step up and do what they could to invest in the right policies, tools and settings.

Mia Garlick, Meta's regional director of public policy, said Meta had a range of systems in place to prohibit harmful content, such as its Teen Accounts, which puts accounts on private by default, restricts messaging, prevents live streaming, places sensitive restrictions on content, offensive words and phrases are filtered out of messages and limits are placed on who they can be tagged or mentioned by.

But when questioned on whether the accounts could be bypassed by teenagers using a different email address, she said “if a young person is trying to evade particular systems they will”.

The settings were introduced to New Zealand early this year.

Restrict tools prevent bullying and harassment, users are able to limit comments, messages and tags, and eating disorder, suicide and self-injury content is restricted.

In the first quarter of 2025, Meta removed 5.1 million pieces of bullying and harassing content globally – 73.3% of which were removed before anyone reported it, its written submission said.

For high-risk content types such as child sexual exploitation material, Meta took action on more than 99% of content before a user reported it, it said.

TikTok’s submission points to a similar policy which will be introduced to Australia later this year, saying many online safety, mental health, and youth advocacy experts had responded with “serious concerns”, alongside more than 15,000 public submissions made in response to the proposal.

It referenced Australia’s eSafety Commissioner to an Australian parliamentary inquiry in 2024, which argued that “restriction-based approaches may limit young people’s access to critical support”.

The submission was concerned young people would access social media in secrecy without the adequate protections in place and potentially increase their likelihood of exposure to serious risks.

Restriction-based approaches could reduce young people’s confidence or inclination to reach out to a trusted adult for help if they do experience harm, it warned.

“Bans also place the onus on children to keep themselves safe, rather than putting the onus on online platforms and services to keep young people safe.”

TikTok users must be aged 13 and older.

“To enforce this minimum age limit, we use both technology and dedicated human moderation that goes well beyond the industry-standard neutral age gate that new TikTok users navigate when they sign up for an account,” the submission said.

Since the beginning of 2023, TikTok removed more than 280,000 accounts in New Zealand of users suspected of being under the age of 13.

National MP Carl Bates said TikTok’s age restiction for under 13-year-olds was not working, and had recently visited primary schools in his electorate that had students in every class with a TiKTok account.

TikTok accounts for users under 16 are set to private by default. These users cannot send direct messages, and their content is not shown to people they don’t know on the For You page.

All accounts registered to users under 18 have a default daily screen time limit of 60 minutes and only users aged 18 or older can host live streams on the platform.

Safeguarding Children CEO Willow Duffy said it would not be as simple as “flipping a switch” to stop young people consuming harmful content.

“A ban risks creating a false sense of security while leaving other harmful spaces unregulated.”

Duffy called on the Government to criminalise creating child pornography using AI, establish a task force to disrupt extremist exploitation networks and embed safety education in schools.

Christopher Luxon said the Government planned to have a policy in place by the end of the term.

“We have regulations in the physical world, we need regulations in the virtual world. We really want to make sure that we're doing everything we can to protect our kids online,” he said.

Public submissions for the inquiry closed on July 30. After further hearings, it will report its findings to the House of Representatives.