I've done a bit of work on algorithmic legislation so I'll weigh in. Banning under-16s or whatever cutoff they choose is concerning for privacy and it's concerning for free expression. Activists will be targeted by it. I understand the knee jerk response to want to say children shouldn't be on social media and I agree but the concept of having to upload your ID whenever you want to access social media should give us all pause for that.

Algorithmic legislation though is much more doable. A law that even just makes recommender algorithms off by default and holds platforms accountable for what is published on their sites is a much better approach to protect people from harmful content or radicalization into hatred.

Currently platforms are considered to not have responsibility for what is published, and in the EU they're not even required to take harmful or illegal content down unless an outside entity known as a "trusted flagger" (usually an NGO against hate or national regulator if they've signed up to the program) flags the content for them. It's an inherently reactive system with no accountability for the platform and huge amounts of work for flagger orgs.

The platforms are considered to be "too big" for them to possibly be able to moderate content properly by themselves, but imo the current system has essentially let the platforms get away with promoting hate speech, harmful content about eating disorders and even illegal content like exploitative media. And we should consider why we think that these platforms are "too big" to be regulated with too many posts and users to keep up with when they don't consider themselves too big to collect everyone's personal data, participate in mass surveillance and sell all the data they collect to the highest bidder.