Majority of NZ adults support social media ban for kids - research

Nearly three quarters of New Zealand adults support a social media ban for children under 14, new research has revealed.

The annual Ipsos Education Monitor surveyed adults in 30 countries about their attitudes to education and young people's lives.

In New Zealand, 72 percent of the 1000 respondents agreed children under 14 should be banned from social media, which was in line with the global average.

The Ipsos survey also found 44 percent of people believed mental health was the biggest challenge facing young people - significantly higher than the global average of 33 percent.

Ipsos country manager Carin Hercock said there could be a relationship between perceived mental health challenges, and support for a social media ban.

"There is a lot of content online that is majorly disturbing for young New Zealanders, and a lot of parents are concerned about that as well," she said.

"It sort of makes sense that concerns around mental health are driving into the idea of a social media ban."

However it was more complex than that, said Hercock, and a social media ban was unlikely to be a "silver bullet" to improving young people's mental health.

Support for the ban increases with age, with 64 percent of those aged 18-34 likely to agree with the ban, compared with 79 percent of people over 65.

The National Party is working on a law to ban social media for under-16s, which it hopes to pass with the support of either its coalition partners or from across political lines.

In June, RNZ's Reid Research poll found 58 percent of respondents supported that proposal.

"I think parents are definitely very concerned with social media and the dangers to their children," Cambridge Middle School principal Daryl Gibbs told Morning Report on Monday, after the survey's release.

"I'm not sure that a complete ban personally is the way to go. If it is the way to go, education is the priority, otherwise all we do is shift the anxiety that's happening... if we just banned it without core education programmes in place for students and their parents."

The Ipsos research also revealed nearly half (48 percent) of people believed the ban on cellphones in schools has had a positive impact, and about a quarter (26 percent) said it had made no difference at all.

Gibbs said while it had not made much difference in primary schools, with fewer kids having one, it had had a big impact at post-primary education.

"I've been in intermediate for 20 years, and we've always pretty much had a 'hand your phone in at the start of the day 'policy. It's a lot easier in an intermediate where the children have a home room than when they're going from class to class at high school.

"For us the phones away for the day wasn't a huge change for our systems, but in the high schools it has been significant."

He said schools generally found it easier to block students from accessing problematic material than parents because they were in a better position to know about - and afford - content filters.

Wary of AI

The survey also found 42 percent of people believe artificial intelligence should be banned in schools, which was "significantly higher" than the 37 percent global average, Hercock said.

"Mistrust of AI tends to be higher in more developed countries," she said.

"There seems to be a cultural difference around the attitudes towards AI, and it could also be because of the high prevalence of digital fraud... impacting trust for New Zealanders."

Gibbs suggested it might not have been clear in the survey what kind of AI people were thinking of when it came to its use in the classroom.

"I think AI is so broad and it's so fast-developing and big that it can feel very overwhelming. There are so many systems and applications that have AI embedded into them and have done for years.

"But I guess it's which part of AI do we mean when we say that, and which parts of AI are we nervous about? There are lots of programmes like ChatGPT, Gemini etc that 13-and-under are not supposed to be accessing anyway, and I know in our schools they don't have access to that at the moment.

"I know Google and Gemini are working on a system for under 13s where it's more protected, but at the moment because it's so open, below 13 is not supposed to access it."

Respondents were fairly split on the state of the education system, with about a third describing it as "poor" while 37 percent said it was "good".

Other countries held similarly mixed views, Hercock said.

Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.