Read the under 16 ban in Australia as ideally their presence on certain social media platforms as being against the law. Parents though very much like the ones that let their under age kids drive on roads despite illegal, will trust those in their judgement will probably be safe, while being able to enforce restrictions of their child if they feel it's robbing their kid of time, self respect or other.

The difference with the ban is unlike back in 2019 when social media were ignoring requests (too hard etc) to remove some of the bad algorithms that were targeting and funnelling teenagers into dark topic areas ... with the change it's on social media to ... well remove targeting algorithms that focus on the 10 to 14 year olds for a start ... else if anything bad outcomes happens - the law I'd imagine will throw the book at them. It also works the other way as well, parents who knowingly permitted their child to engage, won't be rushing off to their lawyers to sue whomever.

The main issue with the ban has been where some people would like to use the under 16 ban as an excuse to do age verification by the most intrusive means as possible - but I could only imagine it only benefits platforms scraping as much PII as they can get.

Yeah, there’s nothing more objectionable than a law that is not seriously enforced. It need not be perfectly enforced (what law is?), but anything that doesn’t come with real teeth should just be repealed, regardless of the merits

The problem is might see the solution is to not have such laws in the first place if they are not enforced. But another solution is to give the government more and more and more enforcement power which will, eventually, be used against the people instead of for them. Just as bad is all these enforcement people have to continually justify their pay so the bar for what constitutes an infraction starts dropping in order to keep the prosecution rates up.

With the approximately zero quality of current administrations the difference between "legitimate" and "legal" has become bewildering and well beyond damaging.

Smoking, drinking, watching adult films. Arguing that adding another to think list leads to "everything" is rather a stretch

Should young people be surveilled to ensure they don't smoke weed, or is it okay if smoking weed is illegal but some of them do it anyway and hide it?