Internet censorship in New Zealand

[1] In August 1993, the New Zealand Parliament passed the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993, which made it the responsibility of the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) to restrict objectionable content in the country.

[3][4] In March 2009, the Minister for Communications and IT, Steven Joyce, stated that the government had been following the controversy surrounding Internet censorship in Australia, and had no plans to introduce something similar in New Zealand.

[11] In March 2019, several websites disseminating footage of the Christchurch mosque shooting were censored by major ISPs in Australia and New Zealand, including Kiwi Farms, 4chan, 8chan, and LiveLeak.

[14] The Department of Internal Affairs maintains a hidden list of banned URLs and their internet addresses on a NetClean WhiteBox server, which as of 2009 contained over 7000 websites.

[3][2] However, while the FVPC Act was interpreted to include the search and seizure of Internet content hosted in New Zealand, it wasn't possible for the DIA to directly take down the website in another jurisdiction.

[21] Proponents of the system tout its over one million blocks per month as evidence of its necessity as part of a multifaceted approach to combating child exploitation.

[20] The system also prevents innocent users from accidentally accessing images of child abuse, which the DIA claims is a public expectation of the government and ISPs.

[11][23] There are also concerns that the filter simply won't work, as it can be bypassed by commonly available technologies such as using encryption or non-HTTP based file sharing methods.