The NZ Social Media Ban is worse than brexit

I hate Brexit.

That's important context, because comparing anything to Brexit is a high bar for me. It was a marketable solution to a complicated problem, sold with slogans far simpler than the reality, followed by years of arguing about how it was supposed to work.

And somehow New Zealand looked at that and thought yeah, that's the way to go.

On the 24th of August 2026, National introduced the Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill, requiring platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube to take "reasonable" steps to keep under-16s from having accounts, on penalty of up to 10 percent of global revenue.

The intention is understandable. Social media can be genuinely awful for young people, algorithmic feeds are built to hold your attention, and platforms push harmful content to keep you scrolling. I don't think we should do nothing about that. I think banning the people instead of fixing the platform is an incredibly stupid and Brexit-coded way to do it.

Brexit condensed a complicated collection of legitimate concerns about the EU into one beautifully simple instruction: Leave. This bill condenses a complicated collection of legitimate concerns about social media into another: Ban under-16s. Both are easy to campaign on. Neither tells you what happens next.

If addictive technology is the problem, why aren't we regulating the addictive technology? Why is this algorithm perfectly fine for someone 16 years and one day old, but so dangerous for someone 15 years and 364 days old?

I don't want the government to make Instagram inaccessible to a 15-year-old. I want the 15-year-old, and everyone else, to be able to press a button that turns the dangerous technology off. That's it.

Apps like Retro (https://retro.app) show it doesn't have to work like this. Social media isn't the problem, the engagement machine is — so regulate the engagement machine: strong privacy defaults, no behavioural advertising, no profiling, chronological following feeds by default, no manipulative streaks or notification spam, and a permanent algorithm off switch.

Instead, we're getting an age gate.

And here comes the extremely predictable problem: to ban under-16s you have to know who is under 16, which means you need some way to determine that I'm not. The bill contemplates age assurance via account information, digital ID and facial age estimation. Entering your birthday wouldn't necessarily be enough. Read that again.

So a law supposedly about children changes social media for everyone:

- Give Instagram your ID

- Use a digital identity provider

- Let software estimate your age from your face

- Let {Meta|Twitter|Google} infer your age from everything it already knows about you

Wonderful choices.

And then there's the obvious one: what happens when a 15-year-old installs a VPN? Australia already restricted under-16s, and teenagers responded in the traditional teenage manner — continuing to use social media, with recent reporting putting usage above 80 percent. So if the restriction is easy to bypass, what have we accomplished? If we make it hard, how much surveillance infrastructure are we prepared to build?

This is where the Brexit analogy stops being a joke. Not in scale, but in approach: a real, complicated issue, an appealing binary solution, the slogan as the easy part and implementation as the thing we'll figure out later. Question Brexit and you're ignoring Leave voters; question this bill and the response is "why don't you want to protect children?"

I do. "Protect children online" is just not an implementation plan.

The funniest part is that this is supposedly Government legislation and two of the three Government parties oppose it. ACT says no, NZ First says no, National says yes, Labour wants more information, and Luxon has confirmed the bill won't reach its first reading before the election. We've begun all this without establishing whether Parliament even wants it. Excellent work everyone.

Regulate the companies instead of treating teenagers as the defective component. If I'm following twenty friends, I should be able to open an app and see what those twenty friends posted. That shouldn't be radical — and unlike a blanket ban, it still protects you when you turn 16.

Because harmful recommendation algorithms do not suddenly become healthy on your sixteenth birthday.

Please regulate the algorithms instead.