>there's a good amount of evidence regarding the harms it can have at this point

Considering this evidence was produced during a time when the public opinion was looking for any excuse to blame social media companies and that the field of research producing those studies has an accuracy of a coin flip I'm unconvinced. I'd need to see a lot more than out of contact quotes from Facebook research or these questionable "we asked kids to taste xyz, they're totally more depressed and it's totally social media's fault."

>kids haven't been able to buy mature games from brick-and-mortar stores like Gamestop since I was a child decades ago

They pirated them instead because kids don't have money.

That being said, I would rather kids be banned from the internet outright rather than the internet becoming yet another watered down place.

Some of this evidence has been produced by companies with an incentive to not produce it (internal Facebook research has shown negative mental health implications for teenage girls on instagram for example — this is known as part of some whistleblowing efforts)

> They pirated them instead because kids don't have money.

I mean sure, a kid can break a window and rob a gun store too... we're not talking about creating rules that are impossible to circumvent, the answer to imperfect regulation isn't no regulation.

> That being said, I would rather kids be banned from the internet outright rather than the internet becoming yet another watered down place.

Content filters have come a long way, this isn't what anyone is suggesting.

>internal Facebook research has shown negative mental health implications for teenage girls on instagram for example — this is known as part of some whistleblowing efforts

This is one of the reasons why I have difficulty taking this rewatch seriously, because that is not what the internal research at Facebook said. That was a media headline that misrepresented the results.

They measured 12 different indicators problematic use of Instagram, body image issues, sadness etc. For teen girls 32% of respondents said that IG made their body image issues worse, what the media didn't say however, is that 45% thought Instagram had no impact and 22% said it made their body image issues better.

And that was basically the worst indicator out of all 12 of them. For example, the same research said that on the question of loneliness 12% of teen girls said that IG made it worse, 36% said it had no impact and 51% said that IG made it better.

On every issue Instagram eat mainly either neutral or positive. And that's the internal research that places like WSJ used to say Facebook causes negative mental health effects in teen girls.

>Content filters have come a long way, this isn't what anyone is suggesting.

No they haven't. It's still the same garbage it always was just dressed up in fancier words. You can look at AI and see how well censoring it works. It's crude and ultimately doesn't work, just makes for a worse experience.