[somenameforme]

Nothing. It's a cancer on all of society, but modern societies generally agree that it's desirable to engage in a reasonable standard of protection for children while also allowing adults to engage in vice or undesirable behaviors if they so desire.

[dv_dt]

I disagree with this standard of prevention, and privacy advocates disagree. It is not a reasonable standard

[somenameforme]

I don't find this particularly compelling. I am a privacy advocate, but you already surrender such on modern social media thanks to the requirement of linking your telephone number to your account, and most (all?) major sites already require identification when accounts are flagged for reasons at their own whimsical and arbitrary discretion. To say nothing of how the vastly overwhelming majority of people use social media.

Beyond this, advocating for privacy is not some prime directive that overrides everything else. The more fundamental issue is that social media is a complete cancer on society. Of course so are alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and many other vices, but the difference between social media and those other vices are that the others are age constrained. Age constraining is not only a completely reasonable standard, but exactly how we treat near to everything else of a similar, or arguably even lesser damaging, profile as social media.

[dv_dt]

For alcohol, tobacco, gambling and many other vices, there are a wealth of other regulations that the supplier side must comply with - including labeling of content, warning labels, tests for amounts of alcohol, ingredients disclosure, enforcement of driving under the influence, regular audits of inventory, added taxation, and public health campaigns.

None of this is being proposed in concert with the age laws for social media. The age limits are the least effective part of the control of adult alcohol and cigarette consumption.

[somenameforme]

You're arguing somewhat incoherently, because what you're saying now has relatively little to what you said before. In any case, you're having an anachronism. Age restrictions on cigarettes came as early as 1883 in the US. Other restrictions started coming nearly a century later. The same is true of other vices.

Age limits are not the end, but the beginning, of regulation of a vice. In reality I don't expect social media will pass the test of time. It's just such a horrible industry. Australia's age restrictions have barely come online and people are already reporting major positive improvements with 43% already observing more in-person socialization, 38% reporting better parent-child relations, and more. [1] And again that's all within the ~6 months since the ban went live!

The Flynn Effect ('raw' IQ increasing over time) actually reversed in most of the Western world sometime in the 90s. In other words people today have a lower raw IQ than those of previous generations, and that's after controlling for immigration and other obvious factors. Australia's measured decline began in 2003, the same year MySpace was launched. I'd hypothesize that within a decade we'll see, if not an increase or stabilization, then at least a sharp reduction in decline rates. I suspect the oft said comment that social media makes people stupid isn't figurative or hyperbolic, but in fact quite literal!

[1] - https://yougov.com/articles/54334-new-yougov-research-shows-...