Look, something has to be done about the overwhelming tides of misinformation, rage, indoctrination, advertising on social media causing misery, suicide, violence and horrible child abuse and fascism, kids unable to concentrate etc... You can blame parents all you like but the most parents can do is take their phones away the equivalence of "don't take drugs". Now people have been calling for a ban, this is maybe because they don't understand their are other mechanisms, people for the most part will just call for a ban because its a simple blunt instrument and not think beyond that because they're unable to conceive of it, remember computer literacy is generally poor. Lets not forget, whatever you do, it'll be wrong, but something needs to be done.
You're not going to please everyone nor can you ensure that no children will be able get on social media, same with knife crime, alcohol, smoking and drugs but if for the majority it works then good, but it shouldn't impact on adults. That said I don't see a ban as the right thing, remove algorithmic content delivery, infinite scrolling and advertising and addictive designs patterns, google did this with the adpocolypse because advertisers were upset and withdrawing from youtube because their ads were being shown on content they didn't like, the difference here is money and the reason why its not been done is again due to money there's no incentive so legislation is required.
Of course some parents will be fine with their kids being on social media same as parents who let their young kids watch 18 movies. But seriously what do we do? We've kicked this can down the road for too long already.
Here's an idea for an age verification method that wouldn't mean handing over data for all people of all ages (i'm guessing that's all the vitriol). You link your kid's phone's account with the parents I believe apple and google have family accounts, the parent set's the age of the child in their account it works across all their devices and you have an age txt record in DNS with parental controls enabled those are check automatically (banned by default), you are then empowering the parents and they can be given a list of domains the kids have been visiting and can allow, if a site claims to be safe and isn't you can fine or some other punishment. Over time we could have a preloaded list of sites child friendly if we can come to a consensus. Perfect is the enemy of good and its going to take many solutions to solve this problem.
Banning social media is very different from banning books, books contain knowledge, wisdom, curated stories and cause you to think and question. Social media could do that of course but its mostly click-bait, rage, misinformation monetised by the platforms rewarding the abusers which is why its so prolific.
