It baffles me that more countries haven't put legislation in place to severely limit what ads can be served to under 18 year olds (or at least under 16).

I worked in an ad agency a number of years ago, and Phillip Morris approached us with a deliberate plan to launch big budget ad campaigns on social media platforms specifically because they could get in front of younger demos more easily (traditional media having existing regulations in my country).

The original idea was to build a large database of prospects to sell direct to even after regulation eventually cracks down on them. Amazingly no regulation has come yet, and Meta has done little to no self-regulation.

You can blame parents, but even then one under appreciated problem with digital ads is the lack of shared experience. With TV advertising, you know what your kid is seeing, everyone can see a verify what ad ran at what time on what channel etc. If a parent and a kid are scrolling social media their experience is entirely different, and you can't go back and see what someone else has seen.

"This government is taking action now to end the targeting of junk food ads at kids, across both TV and online.",

it's a quote from the article, it's very likely they'd ban ads targeted at children.

If your child watches a lot of YouTube, or any at all really, you should really invest in YouTube premium. It's incredible how much people use YouTube but because there is a free option, few bother to fork over $14 a month to remove ads, especially when it vastly improves the experience for your children. In a case like this I think the obvious solution is self-regulation.

Indeed. The problem is, regulating online ads is much trickier