If social media is as bad for them as you seem to think it is, then why wouldn’t it be best for them?

I’m old enough to remember the same trash arguments over video games, rap music, even (for some unknown reason) the Disney Channel. This is just another moral panic.

There were also moral panics about teenage smoking, cannabis and alcohol.

There's three outcomes here, sorted from worst to best

- Kid uses social media, which is bad for kid due to social media.

- Kid doesn't use social media and everyone else does, which is bad for kid due to ostracism

- No kids use social media, which is best for kid because they don't get ostracized.

What you're saying here is to just settle for the middle option which is not as bad as the worst option but is still bad.

This is an overly simplistic, idealistic view of the world that leads to people thinking things like the OP are good and necessary. By recognizing that the world doesn't actually work this way at all—things aren't black and white, they're gray—you come to the conclusion that legislation is the worst way to solve these issues and is totally unnecessary.

That's an overly nonspecific criticism. It's more of a compliment of your own cognitive abilities rather than something tangible I can map onto my comment.

Name-calling now? I’ll give you the fourth option that you neglected to include:

- Kids continue to use social media despite the ban, with some using sketchy circumvention services or older friends to gain access, and with others driven to totally unsupervised social media in foreign countries and/or the dark web, with predictable results. The majority of kids rightly see the restrictions placed upon them as unreasonable and grow up with less respect for government and the law, broadly harming social trust as they enter adulthood.

It's a question of magnitudes. There will be at least one kid who does what you're saying, but how many? My strong intuition is that it'll be a small number, too small to cancel out the benefits. The appeal will be largely gone when the network effects are gone. So I say run the experiment in one country and observe the outcome and adjust accordingly. That is the least idealistic position.

As long as it’s not my country and you don’t try to apply your rules extraterritorially, fine. (And feel free to block US-hosted services if you don’t like the way we run things.)

> you come to the conclusion that legislation is the worst way to solve these issues and is totally unnecessary.

If you want to argue for that point of view, do so. Put forward actual arguments. Your comment reads as “if you were smart like me, you’d know I’m right”. Which is unfalsifiable and unconvincing.