In 2023, more than 18,000 Free Speech Union supporters told the Government they didn’t want a single regulator for online content. The Minister dropped the plan in 2024, saying “harm” was subjective and open to interpretation. Two years on, it’s back.

Labour is promising a “digital duty of care” enforced by a new online regulator. National’s under-16 social media restrictions would hand new powers to Internal Affairs.

Both are being sold as child safety, and both would reach every adult who goes online. Free Speech Union Executive Director Jillaine Heather is joined by retired District Court Judge David Harvey and political commentator Ani O’Brien to work out what changed. Harvey traces the idea from the Law Commission and the Harmful Digital Communications Act to Internal Affairs’ Safer Online Services proposal. He explains why a “digital duty of care” borrows the language of negligence law but has nothing to do with it, and why the real question is power.

O’Brien shows how the public service keeps reshaping the same plan until the packaging sells, and why child safety polls so well with swing voters in an election year. They also ask whether any of it would work for kids. Age verification can’t check only the under-16s, so it means checking everyone. Harvey makes the case for law that steps in after harm is done, and against a regime of prior restraint. O’Brien makes the case for parents setting the rules at home, and Heather points to the laws against grooming and sextortion already on the books. Whoever forms the next government, this fight isn’t going away.

If it’s legal to say, it should be legal to post.