Why the people who could easily fix social media’s harm to kids won’t

Thursday, 16 October 2025

A file photo of then-Facebook (now Meta) CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying via videolink to a US congressional hearing. He and the other social media tycoons could easily prevent children from accessing their platforms, argues Nick Agar.

Nick Agar is a professor of ethics at the University of Waikato.

OPINION: As I write, there’s a bill before Parliament proposing to ban social media use for under-16s. It has the Prime Minister’s support.

It sounds simple enough: stop children from being exposed to the worst of the internet. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We should remember who holds the power to easily fix this problem, and why they are so determined not to.

The technical challenges are trivial. The social media giants - Meta, TikTok, YouTube - could solve the problem tomorrow. They know who we are. They know what we buy, what time we go to sleep, when we’re lonely, and what political content makes us doom scroll. They’ve already solved the problem of targeting advertising at people under 16. So implementing an age ban should be simple.

If you’re a 56-year-old with a passion for gaming gear and hoodies who’s mistakenly locked out of Facebook, Meta could restore your access in minutes upon proof of age. The problem isn’t technical. It’s financial. Their profits depend on not fixing the problem, and on resisting attempts by others, including Aotearoa’s lawmakers, to fix it.

Instagram is a popular social media app which Nick Agar argues profits from being able to lure under-16s.

Expecting them to voluntarily clean up their platforms is like asking Big Tobacco to design effective smoking-cessation classes. Tobacco revenues grow in direct proportion to user engagement with tobacco products. Those companies long understood the value of addicting the young. Big Tech works the same way. It hooks children on the dopamine loops of likes, shares, and outrage. There’s profit now, and still greater profit later, as the habits and consumption patterns of young users are shaped for life.

The art of delay

Like Big Tobacco, Big Tech has perfected delay. Of course, there’s always “more to learn” about social media’s effects on developing minds. (We still don’t have the full picture of cigarettes’ effects on teenage lungs either, because there’s always more to discover.)

There’s a saying that justice delayed is justice denied. For Meta, delay means profit. Every month without regulation keeps the revenue flowing. Tomorrow’s excuses will differ from today’s, but they’ll work the same way. The clever kids of 2030 will be doing fascinating new things online, and Meta will argue that we should “wait and see” before we threaten that. We will clearly know more by 2035 at which time young people’s imaginations will have discovered a new cool thing and justification for delay.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says Cabinet will consider a social media ban on under-16s, despite coalition partner ACT declaring its opposition.

When you try to regulate fast-changing technology, there’s always another frontier just beyond the reach of accountability.

One reliable stratagem for rejecting the easy fix is to insist that we do something else instead, ideally something impossible. We saw that in ACT MP Laura McLure’s proposal that, instead of age bans, we ban deep-fake pornography.

In a striking bit of political theatre, McClure displayed a deep-fake image of herself in Parliament. She’s right that such material should be banned. But her proposal helpfully shifts attention away from a solvable problem to one that no country on Earth can realistically police.

McClure made policing this particular offence easy by dobbing herself in as the creator. (Hats off to her for using parliamentary privilege to entertain bored MPs with a bit of porn.) But what about the flurry of new, likely worse, McClure deep fakes that her performance will inspire? How could anyone in Aotearoa track down and punish all their creators?

Blame the parents

We clearly can’t track down the producers of deep-fake porn, excluding McClure herself. But we can identify the parents of children who suffer online harm. If only they did their job of monitoring what their kids did online!

ACT MP Laura McClure showing a deep-fake image of herself in Parliament, when arguing that the priority should be banning that technology rather than an age-restriction on social media use.

Big Tech loves this argument. It conveniently shifts responsibility from the corporations that profit from harm to the parents who can’t possibly prevent it. It appeals to an ideal-world fantasy in which parents have the time, energy, and technical savvy to take on the full-time job of surveillance. Even if they tried, they’d soon find themselves outsmarted by their children; the young have always had the advantage in mastering new technologies.

It’s a comforting fiction for companies that don’t want to change. When in doubt, blame the parents.

When delay stops working

Meta’s regional director of policy, Mia Garlick, has at least had to front up in New Zealand to defend her company’s record. But other nations have shown how to go further.

In October 2024, Brazil’s Supreme Court blocked access to Elon Musk’s platform X after repeated failures to comply with local law. Musk’s first response was to get on X and call Brazil’s judges out as fascists. But since nothing on X was getting through to Brazil, this had limited effectiveness.

Faced with a shutdown, X promptly paid fines and appointed a local representative and X returned. Flicking the off-switch works. Credibly threatening to do so should also work.

The technology to protect children already exists. What’s missing is the courage to use it.

Big Tech needs and demands access to New Zealanders. The technology companies’ defiance lasts only until profits are credibly threatened.

If we keep waiting for Big Tech to act out of conscience, we’ll be waiting until the next platform invents a new kind of harm.