Backing Families.
Protecting Wisdom.

What is After60?

After60 is a campaign for a maximum social media age of 60, to protect older New Zealanders from algorithmic harm: addictive design, engagement loops that keep people scrolling, and recommendation systems that steer them toward extremes.

We are not anti-technology. Nana can still video-call the mokopuna. We're not suggesting older Kiwis can't handle themselves. But these platforms weren't built to help them.

New Zealand's conversation about online safety has focused almost entirely on young people. That's understandable. But if we're serious about platform accountability, we should be asking harder questions about who else is being harmed, and why holding platforms to account has proven so hard.

But Here's the Thing.

By now you've read our case for a maximum age of 60. Here's the thing: we don't actually want to ban anyone over 60 from social media.

That would be patronising overreach: it treats a whole demographic as incapable of choosing for themselves while doing little about the actual problem.

Sound familiar?

There's an obvious objection here: kids are different.

They are. A fourteen-year-old can't sign a contract, buy alcohol, or vote. And the strongest objection runs deeper than legal lines: adolescence is a formative window, and harm during it shapes who someone becomes in a way the same harm at sixty doesn't. Granted. The harm really is worse the younger you are.

But that's a reason to help children first, not to gate them out. A gate removes the user from the platform; accountability removes the harm. We age-gate alcohol because it can't be made safe; a platform's harm is in its design, and design can be changed. Fixing the platform helps the worst-affected most while protecting everyone else; gating one group out leaves the harm running for every adult, and for the children too once the gate leaks.

The Before16 campaign is raising an important alarm about real harms. We share that concern. The platforms engineered the harm and bank the profit.

But age gates are a blunt instrument, and an easier one to campaign for than the actual fix, because the actual fix means taking on some of the most powerful companies in human history. A gate puts the burden on users and parents; accountability moves it to the platforms. Why not both? Because the gate isn't free: it spends the political will and public patience this fight gets exactly once, it builds the age-verification machinery that becomes its own liability, and it lets everyone declare the problem solved while the platform keeps running untouched. An age gate doesn't sit alongside the real fix. It stands in for it.

It doesn't even work on the people it's meant for. A determined fifteen-year-old has always been able to lie about their birthday, borrow a sibling's login, or use a free VPN; these are the first suggestions in any group chat where someone mentions the ban. The only kid it stops is the one who wasn't trying to get past it. And the cost of chasing the rest falls on everyone: an age gate means age verification for every user on the platform, a store of IDs that doesn't currently exist, sitting on servers waiting for a breach. The critics of B416 have made exactly this point: everyone pays, not just the group being "protected".

That is what enforcement looks like when it runs through the user. Requiring platforms to design their systems responsibly is a different kind of obligation; it sits with the platform, not the person trying to log in. There's no VPN for that.

Banning a demographic from a platform doesn't fix the platform. It shifts the harm, drives it underground, or hands it back to the family members who were already struggling. What New Zealand needs is to make the platforms safe for everyone.