[mort96]

What do you mean by "social media"? We all hate Facebook, but do we all hate Hacker News? Mastodon? A Discord or IRC community for an online game?

I'm all for age restrictions for certain kinds of social media, but age verification is a system of surveillance and the death of online privacy.

[tardedmeme]

So, the actual laws are targeting things more specifically than just "social media". Some are talking about intentionally addictive content algorithms, or personalized algorithms. Others are naming specific named companies.

Don't confuse social media with social networks. Social media is media - they select what you watch, like a TV channel, but personalized for each user. You might get a narrow choice from several options they selected. Social networks are just tools for communication.

I used the word "algorithm" so I'm going to preemptively point out that it means something in relation to social media that's more specific than what it means in computer science.

[omegastick]

In the UK they are not. In fact they are significantly broader. Anything which hosts "user-generated content" visible to other users.