The issue is, to regulate the service Meta (or whoever) provides, they have to age gate anyway. Unless the service is child friendly for all users. Which would mean; follow and friend limits, usage limits, blackout periods after 9pm, only seeing posts from friends, no algorithmic "time line". That sort of thing.

That regulation would be orders of magnitude more difficult to implement. Just look at the malicious compliance the cookie regulations created, that was a single modal.

Better to just ban it for under 16s. That might happen before my kids are old enough to be fully exploited.