Neil Sands
Facebook and Instagram owner Meta has denied deliberately targeting New Zealand children with addictive content and warns that banning under-16s from social media risks pushing them towards “less regulated spaces”.
The US-based tech giant also told a parliamentary inquiry that the burden for age verification of online users should lie with app distributors, such as the Apple App Store and Google Play, rather than the makers of individual apps.
Meta’s regional director of policy Mia Garlick appeared this week before the Education and Workforce Select Committee’s inquiry into the online harm young New Zealanders face to set out the steps the company has taken to protect minors. These included the introduction of teen accounts on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger with tighter content controls than ordinary accounts and the ability for parents to set time limits on their use.
“This really reflects our belief that young people deserve online spaces that are age appropriate, that are protective and that are guided by the adults in their lives,” Garlick said.
She was quizzed by National Party MP Vanessa Weenink, the former deputy chair of the New Zealand Medical Association, about features such as infinite scrolling and algorithm-driven content, which Weenink said was “basically hacking human dopamine access and is related to addictive behaviour that would meet the clinical threshold [of addiction]”.
Garlick rejected the assertion.
“The suggestion that that our services are designed to be intentionally addictive really misrepresents our intentions and the work that we do,” she said.
“We want people to have a positive and intentional experience using our services. Certainly, within teen accounts, there’s a number of time management controls, including the ability for parents to set daily time limits. So we do try to provide tools. I mean, obviously, algorithmic content ranking is designed to put the most relevant content up the top, so that you see the most interesting content first, and then you can go and do other things.”
‘Balanced’ approach
Rather than a blanket ban on social media access, Garlick said Meta favoured allowing access to age-appropriate content moderated by app stores.
“We’re seeking to promote a whole-of-ecosystem approach to age assurance. So, while a lot of the debate has focused solely on social media, we note that this committee is considering all online activity and experiences of young New Zealanders and if we think about the way in which young people move seamlessly between different apps, that’s why we believe that it’s important that age assurance is an industry-wide commitment for the online ecosystem.
“One challenge with providing an age-appropriate experience online is that some degree of personal information is required. That’s either age-related data, it’s ID verification, it’s age estimation using biometric data, or it’s behavioural data using age-inference models. If each app individually has to verify age, then there are increased privacy and security risks and an increased burden on young people and their families to confirm their age with each app.
“A similar approach, but one that takes a data-minimisation approach, is app store or operating-system level age assurance. Under this model, app stores like the Apple App Store or the Google Play store would confirm age, then share age band signals with each app, and then each app tailors their age-appropriate experience to these signals and feeds back any relevant information.”
Garlick said Brazil and about 20 US states had adopted this approach.
“So, our view is that, rather than locking teens out of digital platforms entirely, which can push them towards less regulated spaces, there’s an opportunity for New Zealand to create a more balanced, effective and enforceable solution, similar to the approach that other jurisdictions have undertaken,” she said.
‘Can’t fence the ocean’
TikTok’s public policy lead for content and safety, Ella Woods-Joyce, has a similar warning about the impact of blanket bans.
“We do acknowledge that much of the debate is on blunt age bans at the moment, but many hundreds of experts – including those that your committee has heard from today and in hearings before today – have warned that blunt bans don’t work, that they may, in fact, send children and young people to places on the internet that don’t have the safety, the teams and the tools that large platforms like ours do to keep those children and young people safe. So when we’re thinking about the internet, we really need to acknowledge that it is here to stay.”
Referencing a quote from Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, Woods-Joyce said: “We can’t fence off the ocean. We need to teach our children to swim in a digital environment and we need to invest in digital literacy.”
She said TikTok had removed 280,000 accounts in New Zealand that it suspected were set up by children aged under 13.
“Safety is absolutely a top priority for us and one of the core pillars of that safety work is making sure that people are the age that they need to be to use our platform.”
Deepfake bullying
ACT MP Laura McClure addressed the committee in support of her private member’s bill to ban the production and distribution of non-consensual and explicit deepfakes.
McClure brandished a deepfake of herself in Parliament in May to show how easy it was.
She told the committee it took five minutes using readily available online tools which had no age verification and did not properly check if consent had been obtained to use the image that was being submitted.
She said young people, mostly girls, were being subjected to “horrible abuse and bullying” via deepfakes and the laws that were supposed to protect them were inadequate.
“Our harmful Digital Communications Act is around 10 years old now and it’s just not fit for purpose,” she said.
“We know that it needs a big overhaul and we know that we need to do more in the space around potentially regulating, but what we could do is actually go for something really simple right now that would actually make a difference, and that is to say that deep-faking people without their consent into pornography as illegal.”
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