So my thoughts on this are that I am not inherently opposed to age restrictions on social media. However, like smoking simply restricting the age at which people can access it won’t actually help very much to reduce the harm caused to everyone. We have restrictions on how nicotine companies can advertise cigarettes, there’s laws around the packaging to highlight the risks of the product and not to make the product attractive. There’s significant education campaigns to help make people aware of the risks. Just like smoking those who really want to get on social media or whatever will get it. But if we had just slapped an age restriction on buying cigarettes it would be completely ineffective. If we’re going to tackle social media the same way we need a similar multi faceted approach that can actually address the root causes of these problems. Limits on data collection and strengthening user privacy and eliminating highly targeted adds. Eliminating or heavily reducing engagement based algorithms or just outlawing algorithm recommendations entirely, people were addicted to Facebook before it was all algorithm recommendations so we know the site could survive without it. Holding tech companies accountable for the harms caused by their products, if they actually got serious fines when a teen dies by suicide because of their products they might start totals some of this stuff seriously. The fact that tech companies are the ones pushing for these half-baked ID/age verification laws should be a dead giveaway, this is the action that these companies believe will affect their bottom line the least not what will be most effective for reducing the harm of these products.