Your first look at our report, What We're Watching: New Zealanders' views about what we see on screen and online, released today.
Research we've conducted over the past few years has focused on critical issues such as misinformation and young people viewing pornography. These studies highlighted the real world impacts of potentially harmful content from a New Zealand perspective.
We saw the need to follow up on this research by exploring New Zealanders’ views about a broader scope of content – whether in entertainment content such as movies, shows and video games, or in posts or videos on social media and other online spaces.
We asked the New Zealand public about their views on the classification system and about the potential harms of content in movies, games, and other material available online.
The nationwide online survey was conducted with 1,000 people aged 18 years and over, with a youth booster sample of 200 people, aged 16 to 17 years old.
We've summarised our key findings below. To read the full report, click here.
“The research in this report provides significant insight into New Zealanders' views about the type of harms that come from content, and the areas that cause them most concern. We can see, for example, that New Zealanders are concerned about the depictions of problems in society, such as sexual violence and harassment, self-harm and suicide, racism and violence.”
— Acting Chief Censor Rupert Ablett-Hampson
Most think it’s hard to protect our kids online.
Most New Zealanders think it’s hard to protect children from inappropriate or harmful online content.
Families use various tools to help them manage kids’ access
to content, including age ratings and parental controls. Parents and caregivers think that age ratings and content warnings are particularly useful in this area.
Asked about their own knowledge of online safety, a majority felt they personally know enough to help their whānau stay safe online, although relatively few felt highly confident about this.
New Zealanders support regulation of harmful online content.
There is widespread support among New Zealanders for regulating harmful content. However, only a minority think the current regulatory system is working well to keep young people safe from harmful content online.
People also lack confidence in tech companies to keep them safe. Just 33% ‘somewhat’ or ‘strongly’ agreed that online platforms provide what people need to keep them safe.
Asked about what more could be done to help keep themselves and their whānau safe online, people talked about the importance of:
• stronger and better regulation
• better education, information and support
• improved technical solutions and tools
• the need for tech/social media companies to do more.
For Teens, Saving Each Other From Social Media Is a Team Effort
“In my younger teenage years, it felt like if you were addicted to social media, it was your responsibility to recognize that and log off when you were spending a lot of time online. It made me feel guilty about being on my phone all the time,” she says, adding that worrying about social media used to keep her awake at night. “But after seeing how the platforms are designed to maximize your usage, it was like, well, they never told us they were making it impossible for us to get off.”
Hear from the experts themselves and check out the full article below.
How Teens Are Protecting Their Peers From Social Media Harms | Time
Also check out:
What are you Watching in your Whare Campaign.
Tomorrow we will be launching our "What are you Watching in your Whare?" campaign.
The campaign takes our key findings from the 'What We're Watching' report and turns them into useful tips, tools and advice for whānau.
Make sure you follow our different social media channels for more information:
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