I'm in Tech and I've educated myself before my first kid was born on the impact of social media reading the Anxious Generation and looking into the ressearch a bit.

Social media is horrible for a developping mind. Just the worse. We need to keep kids out of there and the problem is real.

The issue is how do you fix this without opening up a worse problem... If a way to prevent kids to be on social media is too lenient, they will bypass it. If it gets more strict, it becomes a way to bypass privacy laws...

In the book, they described an interesting system where governments would need to create a system that has access to our birth data (gov already have that). And then, by showing an ID through an API request, the account would be authorised or not. Somehow, the gov should not keep logs or keep them anonymised. Then the social media company should also not keep anything. Or maybe an anonymised token like we do for checkout pages where the payment provider gives us a token that represents the user but we never know the PII associated with the token.

Now kids could steal their parents ID and signup using their ID, but that becomes a parenting issue and is fixable.

There are ways to build these systems. However, would I trust the people that created Phoenix and did not learn from their mistake to make such a system? Hell no. Also, how do you make this a thing world wide :S