alt Hacker NewsAustralia was one of the first countries to institute social media bans under a certain age. Reading the reports and commentary from parents there has been fascinating, but not really surprising if you remember what it's like to be a kid.
The most positive thing I read was that the kids are spending less time on social media in front of adults (like at the dinner table) because they're not supposed to be on social media.
But most of the parents in the article I read believed their kids had circumvented the ban somehow. Their problem now was that the kids' social media use was entirely hidden from them and they had no way to monitor it or even bring it up with their kids. The kids didn't want to admit to using social media at all.
None of this should be very surprising for any of us who remember back into childhood. Circumventing the restrictions was a game with its own reward. I had friends who were finding ways to get around the school's internet controls for the fun of doing it, not because it blocked any sites they wanted to use.
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The upside of well-crafted social media bans for kids under a certain age is that you can use them to apply financial pain to social media companies for failing to prevent kids from signing up.
I was definitely that kid. I remember discovering that my district's web filter had a default password (something like "changethis123"), by watching one substitute with exceptionally poor typing skills. Problem was, substitutes' accounts were disabled frequently, and any one account only really had a lifetime of a week or two, before someone in the IT department realized that 300 devices were connecting to the network with the same credentials.
But the staff lists were public, and I had the default password. So I set up a script to turn the lists of names of teachers, librarians, janitors, etc. into usernames, and then tried to login with all of them. Turns out, most support staff, especially custodians, hadn't changed their passwords. (I'm guessing their jobs didn't involve much computer use). With a list of a couple dozen working accounts, I'd mete out 1 or 2 at a time to my friends, and we had teacher-level access for the rest of our time there. Don't remember using it for much, maybe showing my friends a youtube video during lunch or something.