Neil Sands
New Zealand’s online protection laws are so fragmented, outdated and ineffective that authorities have been powerless to block access to a pro-suicide web forum linked by a coroner to the deaths of five New Zealanders, Parliament has been told.
In a submission to a parliamentary inquiry into the harm young New Zealanders are encountering online, The Law Association of New Zealand’s (TLANZ) Technology & Law Committee has called for urgent action to deal with emerging digital threats.
The submission outlines numerous online hazards, ranging from AI-generated deepfake pornographic images of minors to addictive algorithms promoting harmful, exploitative content.
It warns existing laws – including the Harmful Digital Communications Act (HDCA) – are outdated and do not require accountability or transparency from online platforms.
The submission says the Digital Safety Group, run by the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA), has no oversight of many of the platforms that enable harmful online activity and Netsafe, which administers the HDCA, is a charity with no enforcement powers.
“We’re very far behind right now… Australia, the EU, the UK have all been working on this for years,” said Isaac Lam, a member of the TLANZ tech committee and one of the submission’s authors.
“They have dedicated government bodies like Ofcom in the UK and the eSafety Commissioner in Australia who have been established and empowered specifically to consider prospective harms that might not be covered by the laws.
“New Zealand isn’t as proactive at all. We’re very much just sitting here occasionally trying to copy bits of legislation from overseas here and there when it fits a political agenda, like with the Social Media Age-Restricted Users Bill.
“We don’t have the broad frameworks to give these issues proper consideration.”
Take-down notice ignored
One of the most striking examples of how toothless New Zealand’s online protections are concerns an online forum, apparently US-based, that promotes suicide and has been linked to Kenneth Law, a Canadian accused of assisting suicides by selling packages containing material that people can use to kill themselves.
Law is set to stand trial in Canada next year on 14 murder charges, but the number of people who have committed suicide after receiving his packages is believed to be in triple figures, with British authorities investigating 88 deaths in that country alone.
Five New Zealanders, one of them a teenager, have committed suicide after receiving packages ordered online from Law, Coroner Alexandra Cunninghame has found.
They are: Crow Grant, 18, Liana Kirk, 21, Nicolas Heyworth, 21, Sayaka Steed, 25, and James Plunket, 40.
In her finding on Plunket’s death, Cunninghame outlined the efforts authorities in New Zealand made to curb access to an online forum that Law frequented. LawNews is not naming the website or detailing the contents of the packages that Law sold.
She says the Classification Office found that eight discussion threads on the website were “objectionable” under the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act, making them unlawful in New Zealand, although the office said policing such publications was not its job.
“The role of the Classification Office does not extend to enforcing classification decisions or practically restricting access to objectionable publications. That role falls to other agencies, for example DIA, NZ Police and NZ Customs,” the Classification Office told LawNews.
Classification Office documents show that the DIA sent the site operators a take-down notice, which they ignored, instead posting that “all future censorship demands from any foreign government will be ignored and blocked”.
Cunninghame’s findings reveal that the Suicide Prevention Office, run by the Ministry of Health, then asked internet service providers to voluntarily block access to the site from New Zealand.
LawNews has asked the ministry to detail the outcome of the request, but the ISPs do not appear to have acted.
The website is still accessible from New Zealand at the time of publication. Users encourage suicide and exchange methods that people can use to kill themselves, often using the acronym CTB, or “catch the bus”.
Digital problem, analogue solution
With efforts to block online access proving fruitless, Cunninghame details how a working group including Customs, the Environmental Protection Agency and Ministry for the Environment was set up to examine the issue of online sale of the product Law was selling.
In other words, the group looked at intercepting these packages physically at the border – an analogue solution to a digital problem.
LawNews asked Customs to detail the outcome of the working group’s efforts and whether it was still meeting. “Customs has put in place criteria to identify imports of this substance, which do not appear to comply with the relevant controls. Where there is risk of non-compliance, Customs notifies the Environmental Protection Agency, Police and the Ministry of Health,” Customs said.
Lam, who became aware of the website’s existence when working for Netsafe, said it highlighted the inadequacies of the HDCA and the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act.
“The HDCA is written in such a way that it applies only to targeted communications from one party to another,” he said.
“Even though it mentions that a communication shouldn’t incite or encourage an individual to suicide, for it to apply, the communications must basically be directly targeted at the victim. There must be some kind of causation where the communication is intended to actually cause the person to take action towards committing suicide.
“If someone were to just post general information about how to access suicide without awareness that the specific person receiving it is going to commit suicide, that probably wouldn’t meet the threshold.
“Basically, in a case like this, the HDCA would only look at individual posts on the forums… It’s not really a law that allows us to consider an entire website.
“It’s a similar situation with the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act, which has a narrow definition of what can be classified as objectionable.”
Action needed
The TLANZ tech committee recommends a proactive approach to addressing online harm, including future-ready legislation, platform accountability and a coordinated cross-sector approach, incorporating targeted enforcement capability.
Lam said the scale of the issues around online safety was significant and the need for action was pressing, but he was optimistic the parliamentary inquiry, which is being run by the Education & Workforce Select Committee, would make a difference.
“I’d say I’m hopeful, because it a positive step. I’m guessing the intention is probably to look to what’s happening overseas then decide how New Zealand can implement and effect approach of its own,” he said.
“Whether that happens or not, at the moment it’s just too soon to say.”
The inquiry’s report to Parliament is due by the end of November.
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