I agree with all of those, but they point towards adolescents, where people are gaining adulthood.

For kids under say, 14 years old, you can simply look at children in your direct vicinity and observe the impact of abundant use of things like Youtube, Roblox and others (sorry I'm not hip with it), where it is impacting their motor and cooperative skills, as well as their confidence.

Saying that the platforms used by minors are an important aspect of their social life feels incredulous to me, given that spending time together IRL is such a big factor in learning how to converse with people with differing opinions, without being shielded from them by some engagement-optimizing algorithm.

Where I live, all of that, combined with the enormous pressure social media puts on these kids to always have to take others' cameras in mind, with the ads showing them all sorts of bs, makes me feel like I wouldn't have made it out of childhood like I have done.

Of course there are positives too, as you pointed out. Having an easily accessible network of peers could be a great help with questions you'd never ask anyone in your direct vicinity. Except that no platform where kids gather is actually safe, and easily transforms into grooming platforms.

So yea, a ban is definitely a ham-fisted approach, but in my opinion, given the already sketchy situation surrounding the privacy for such an age check, I personally can't think of a better solution or middle ground to keep the positives of social media. Maybe force the platforms to abandon their current algorithms?

Sorry if it's hard to read, i tried to proofread but I'm on mobile.