New Zealand targets social media and AI companions for under-16s

New Zealand plans to bar children under 16 from using major social platforms and AI companions under a bill announced on August 24, 2026. The proposed Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill would cover TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook, while placing new age-verification and child-safety obligations on the companies operating them.

The measure is not yet law. New Zealand’s Parliament must approve the bill first; after approval, covered platforms would have six months to comply. The proposal would also establish an online safety regulator within the country’s Department of Internal Affairs.

“Obviously, parents have a role to play in monitoring what social media platform their children are on, but so do social media companies. We have protections to keep children safe in the real world and we need them in the virtual world too.”

Age checks would be the platforms' responsibility

The bill would require “high risk” platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent under-16 users from accessing their services. The proposed mechanisms include age-estimation tools and digital ID services, but the legislation does not specify which technology companies must deploy, what accuracy threshold they would need to meet or how the government would handle users who cannot or will not provide identity data.

That leaves privacy and implementation questions unresolved. Age estimation can require analysis of a user’s face, voice or behavior, while digital ID systems can create a separate identity and data-retention burden. The bill text, as summarized in the government’s announcement, establishes the obligation but does not settle those technical choices.

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The legislation would also require social media companies to regularly assess and report potential risks to users under 18. Those assessments would extend beyond checking a person’s age at sign-up: platforms would have to document how their services could expose minors to harm and report those risks to the regulator.

The bill says:

“New Zealand’s current regulatory framework does not adequately safeguard children online. While some protections exist, there is no overarching framework that regulates social media platforms or platforms with social AI companions to help protect children from the risk of online harm.”

The full Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill defines the proposed legal framework. The government’s press statement describes the measure as a shared responsibility between parents and technology companies.

Fines could reach $40 million

Platforms that fail to meet the requirements could face fines of up to $40 million or 10 percent of a platform’s global revenue. The source material does not clarify how that penalty would be calculated, whether the two figures represent alternative maximums, or which corporate entity would be responsible for payment.

For US users, the immediate effect is limited: this is a New Zealand proposal, not a US restriction, and no US compliance date follows from it. For American platforms, a New Zealand service-access rule would add another jurisdiction-specific age gate to products that already operate across different privacy and online-safety regimes.

The proposal follows Australia’s social-media restrictions for children under 16 and similar political efforts in the United Kingdom, Canada and Brazil. New Zealand’s version also explicitly includes social AI companions, treating conversational systems aimed at users as part of the same child-safety problem as algorithmic social platforms.

The proposal does not yet settle Parliament’s approval, the final definition of a “high risk” platform, the regulator’s enforcement powers or the permitted age-verification methods. Until those details are set, it does not provide a working access-control specification.