The amount of extreme or violent content being reported to the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) jumped 25% last year, with much of the content investigated promoting white identity-motivated ideology.
In its latest Digital Violent Extremism Transparency Report, the DIA said 886 URLs (web page addresses) were reported in 2023, with 38% of them objectionable, making them illegal under the Films, Videos and Publications Classification Act.
For content to be classified illegal it must depict violence, cruelty, and crime in a way that could be harmful, promote or encourage acts of terrorism and crime or degrade, dehumanize, or demean any person or group.
The DIA said X (formerly known as Twitter), Telegram, and TikTok were the most common platforms found to host violent or extreme content, with 54% of the URLs reported related to the Christchurch terrorist attacks.
The Online Safety Coalition said the report is just the "tip of the online harm iceberg" and one of the many reasons why stronger laws are needed to protect New Zealanders.
"Terrorism and violent extremism content is just one type of harmful content online," spokesperson Sue Kedgley said.
"Every day, young people are being recommended eating disorder, self-harm and suicide content, and women and gender diverse communities are receiving a deluge of online abuse, harassment and violence.
"This content is frequently recommended by a platform's algorithm, and to make it worse, for the average user, there are weak and ineffective complaint systems."
Kedgley said New Zealand's laws are "hopelessly out of date" and were designed at a time when people were still renting videos.
"We are calling on the Government to build on the work that the DIA, the Classification Office and DPMC have already started, and urgently pass meaningful legislation to protect New Zealanders from online harm and abuse."
A spokesperson for Internal Affairs Minister Brooke van Velden said the Government has not made a decision yet regarding a social media regulator.
The DIA report also detailed what it called "emerging harms", including the "gamification" of terrorist and violent extremist content, as well as the sharing of such material.
It cited one example last year when a young person had uploaded the Christchurch mosque attack livestream video, in addition to content depicting the sexual exploitation and abuse of children and extreme sexual violence.
The content had been uploaded and shared across a range of online platforms.
The DIA said the discovery was a major shock to the young person's family, who thought they were online gaming only, although their online time was unsupervised.
However much of the online content reported last year was not removed because it did not meet the legal threshold to be objectionable.
The DIA described such content as "awful, but lawful".
Examples included profile pictures of an IS flag, a swastika, a photograph of Adolf Hitler or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and mass killers such as the Christchurch or Buffalo terrorists.
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