Yesterday, parliament heard that the major parties will come together and pass a law banning teenagers from social media, after a period of careful thought roughly commensurate with that of a 15-year-old making a Black Friday impulse buy at Shein.com.
It would give legal power to the Commercial Social Media platforms to collect more private information about us, which would they can then use for their own commercial purposes.
They will lose the 0-16 y/o demographic, but they aren’t a directly profitable market anyway.
The 16 year old demographic will be much more profitable, because they wouldn’t have been conditioned to deal with the predatory behaviour of commercial Social Media platforms.
I remember reading an article once that claimed that 12 year old girls had some of the most buying power in western societies due to their influence on their fathers decision making. It suggested that there were whole ad campaigns focused on their demographic for a huge range of things that you wouldn’t normally associate with 12 year old girls (eg cars).
The legislation does appear to include requirements for handling of personal data acquired to confirm age of users.