This concerted global effort is more about building the surveillance infrastructure for the web that will be required given AI's takeoff, and less-so about the well being of children.
But I think the conversation people aren't having is the reverse of this: when is it time to ban people over, say, 65 from social media? They're often victims of scams and propaganda bot farms.
What do we do about adult radicalization on the Internet?
This is why they have lobbied many states in America for age verification laws, and are the alleged main funding source for the campaigns trying to make this about child safety when it’s about their profits. And the governments support it because it means they can identify people online and suppress speech. It’s literally the fascist notion of merging corporate power and authoritarian government power.
I will absolutely be barring my children from social media. I fully expect them to use it or similar sorts of stuff behind my back, but that's okay. It will then be hidden and scarce, which limits the overall negative consequences it can have. Being in a country where this is enforced at a national level is extremely appealing to me.
Social media provides decentralized information transmission, so people (kids are people) are able to obtain information without it first being filtered through a small cabal of self-interested media corporations and governments. If there was no social media, the Iran war would probably have overwhelming popular support like the Iraq one and there'd already be US boots on the ground.
No media organisation is perfect but your description of social media as some nirvana of decentralised truth is very questionable.
And yes "decentralised" meaning we have personal echo-chambers or a swarm of Elon sycophant accounts with inflated number of views and bots mass liking each extremist post. LLMs are going to put astroturfing campaigns on steroids.
If these laws were about integrity in social media, there would be disclosure laws for paid time or content creation, disclosure of who pays for ads or time of creators. This would equally protect adults and kids instead of dubious age laws
Beyond this, advocating for privacy is not some prime directive that overrides everything else. The more fundamental issue is that social media is a complete cancer on society. Of course so are alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and many other vices, but the difference between social media and those other vices are that the others are age constrained. Age constraining is not only a completely reasonable standard, but exactly how we treat near to everything else of a similar, or arguably even lesser damaging, profile as social media.
None of this is being proposed in concert with the age laws for social media. The age limits are the least effective part of the control of adult alcohol and cigarette consumption.
Age limits are not the end, but the beginning, of regulation of a vice. In reality I don't expect social media will pass the test of time. It's just such a horrible industry. Australia's age restrictions have barely come online and people are already reporting major positive improvements with 43% already observing more in-person socialization, 38% reporting better parent-child relations, and more. [1] And again that's all within the ~6 months since the ban went live!
The Flynn Effect ('raw' IQ increasing over time) actually reversed in most of the Western world sometime in the 90s. In other words people today have a lower raw IQ than those of previous generations, and that's after controlling for immigration and other obvious factors. Australia's measured decline began in 2003, the same year MySpace was launched. I'd hypothesize that within a decade we'll see, if not an increase or stabilization, then at least a sharp reduction in decline rates. I suspect the oft said comment that social media makes people stupid isn't figurative or hyperbolic, but in fact quite literal!
[1] - https://yougov.com/articles/54334-new-yougov-research-shows-...
"Algorithms that track user engagement to prioritize what is shown tend to favor content that spurs negative emotions like anger and outrage. Overall, most online misinformation originates from a small minority of “superspreaders,” but social media amplifies their reach and influence."
https://www.apa.org/topics/journalism-facts/how-why-misinfor...
If you make a simple substitution, it becomes clear that "limits the overall negative consequences it can have" in no way logically follows from "behind my back" and "it will then be hidden". Draconian bans are, simply put, extremely lazy parenting, and not only lazy, but ineffectual. All the more so when it's something as relatively innocuous as social media, where your children will be actively shunned by their peers and come to resent you while still finding ways to use it. If you want good outcomes for your children, play an active role in their life and guide them positively instead of thinking you can just say "don't do X" and that will magically be the end of all problems.
And no the effects are not "relatively innocuous." It's having a catastrophically negative effect on children, especially girls. Rather than cherry picking one of the zillion studies to support this I'll just link to a search [1], because the evidence is not ambiguous.
[1] - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=effects+of+social+media...
Psychology, incidentally, is a completely bunk field of fake science, with somewhere between 2/3rds and 3/4ths of papers being unreplicable. I am highly amenable to applying research and statistics to inform decision-making, but it does you no good if you're using faulty research and statistics. Using the 'authority' of a bad field as a bludgeon to avoid actually making your argument is not compelling. I suggest articulating a case yourself rather than reaching for an article dump as though it proves you objectively correct, unless your goal is simply to reinforce your own biases and assure yourself of the correctness of your decisions, their actual correctness be damned.
Also, I'd note there's kind of two different points of discussion here. One is "banning it for my child even though it's legal" and one is a "national ban". Even if you support the latter and believe it would have a positive outcome, that does not mean it will necessarily have a positive outcome to still ban your children when all of their peers are definitely using it. As far as I see it, a national ban is a complete non-starter for positive outcomes because, regardless of whether it has or doesn't have a positive outcome on a child's social environment, for it to be enforceable requires acceding to a surveillance state in which internet usage is directly tied to your government ID, at which point the negative outcomes for society outweigh any possible positive outcome for children by 100 to 1. You do not want to give government complete and total control of the means of communication, I promise you. Even if you trust your current government to not abuse it, once they have that control it's never becoming undone, so you must also trust that every future government in your and your children's lifetimes will also not abuse the uncontrolled power they've been given -- and if you have that level of unconditional trust in any society, I have a mighty fine bridge to sell you, a real beauty it is.
And as an aside, the whole point of me linking to a search of all studies that the results are not only replicable, but universal. Social media is just horrible for society, especially children, everywhere.
[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/php/data-statistics/youth-data-t...
My personal opinion is supported by life experiences and rational thinking. If all you can do is outsource your thoughts to other people with a 75% miss rate, of which 25% of studies came to the opposite effect when attempted to be replicated, you are simply a tool to be used by propagandists. Let's not forget that psychology is a field that is as likely to find a consistent effect for psychic powers - literal psychic powers - as it is anything else[1]. Those studies are not 'evidence' of anything. The bar is on the floor when it comes to the level of scientific rigor exhibited in the field.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-o...
Actually, the more emotionally invested you are in it, the less likely it is for you to question the motives behind it.
[1] - https://yougov.com/en-gb/daily-results/20251202-12c49-2
I think we lost this fight about 2-3 decades ago, when we sacrificed privacy for free stuff, mainly because the environment wasn’t this hostile yet. However, these additional steps in the wrong direction doesn’t help at all, but I also think that nobody will get any new information with these nowadays.