Because just like the argument with social media in my opinion it’s better to have governmental regulation on these things so millions of households don’t have to have the same argument with their kids and kids not on social media platforms don’t get left out of a significant percentage of teenage life effectively socially stunting them.
Millions of households talking about this stuff with their kids, setting rule and boundaries and punishments, is exactly what should happen. That is literally what parenting is, and every parent must do it. Pushing that responsibility to the state is not only lazy, it's anathema to a free society. Your children will grow up to be robots who only know how to do what an authority figure tells them to do.
In my opinion it shouldn’t. If 75% of kids are using social media it’s very hard to make the argument that your kid shouldn’t have a smartphone since your kid will argue that you are making them a social pariah (and rightfully so).
As a society we collectively tell kids they can’t have destructive, addictive substances until they’re a certain age and I believe social media and smartphones belong in that category.
But why fall back on the state to police every website and service? Not to mention that the Internet is wider than any jurisdiction you can hope to achieve.
Plenty of devices have parental controls and it is your duty as a parent to look into this and understand the consequences when you hand a device to your child that allows them to consume a global diet of media and connects them to a majority of the global populous. It is not unreasonable to expect device/software manufacturers to provide the power to parents to do this and we already have had the free market provide options for this for decades.
To me, it is not any different than to expect a parent to consider the potential consequences of children playing in the streets, etc. and take action. Thus, to me, the people pushing this kind of legislation are either sloppy thinkers or dishonest in what aims they hope to achieve.
