Labour has promised a Digital Duty of Care law that would require online platforms to protect Kiwis from “harmful content and addictive designs”.
The party also pledged to get National’s Bill banning social media for under-16s through its first reading and into Select Committee within 100 days.
Labour’s law proposal would require people to verify their age using digital IDs, physical IDs or facial age estimation. However, NZ First Leader Winston Peters said banning social media “means either banning VPNs or using digital ID for everyone”. An RCR/Curia poll in September found 52% of Labour voters opposed being required to use digital IDs, facial scanning or biometrics to access social media.
The Free Speech Union said “harmful” was not defined in Labour’s proposal and could include lawful speech, as decided by Labour’s new online regulator. FSU Executive Director Jillaine Heather said social media platforms facing fines could be “punished for leaving something up and never taking it down”, which may mean that “contested political and moral opinion will be the first to disappear”.
Former District Court judge and internet law expert David Harvey told RCR the Digital Duty of Care was “a censorship model,” adding that if an entity could “control the information feed, you control everything”.
Harvey said the proposal followed a Department of Internal Affairs plan under the Ardern government to extend broadcasting-style content standards to social media, which was dropped after Labour lost the 2023 election. He also pointed to the DIA’s existing multi-million-dollar online safety funding, arguing the proposed “independent” regulator could remain closely tied to the state.
Harvey warned that free speech might have an expiry date: “Say it quick, because you don’t know how long you’re going to have the right to keep on saying it”.
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Does this traveling repertoire freak show to what habits we are all well accustomed and realize to be corrupt through the deceit and maleficence blatantly displayed during the COVID debacle really have any idea nor semblance as to what it is on about or where it is going?
Labour suffers from a broken moral compass damaged rudder and no credibility remaining whatsoever
Really the state of politics in NZ is at its lowest ebb
NZ’s darkest hour
All these promises and displays of lack of understanding and intellectual capacity to deduce and ascertain are driving us onto a lee shore and disaster
National socialist legislation at its best from a party that wont even acknowledge the will of over half its own voting base! Why? Because they are losing ground every election and they know it too. Hoping desperately that silencing people on line will somehow reduce the resentment at the failure that’s right in front of them, every single day. Good luck with that!
To my mind anachronistic neo liberal globalist parties like Labour and National have more than had their day and the flood of voters away from them tells its own story. The day both are gone from the political landscape will be a good day for the people of New Zealand.
The two party uni Sanhedrin system of government is in its final stages of disintegration and collapsing into its own footprint now
Does anybody think the political landscape in NZ at the moment resembles in any way anything that could be close to or considered to be resembling normal?
Gerry Brownlee looks like he could go on a diet too (FC)
Lefty socialist nut bags ALWAYS seek to restrict free speech.
The lefty’s are the most dangerous of them all.
Look at that nut at who just ploughed into an MP in Melbourne. he was a climate change warrior. Absolute nut bag lefty. The media will do anything to portray him as something else.
Who tabling the Social Media ban for under 16’s legislation? National, backed by Labour. No right or left here mate, just globalists.