Parenting failure 101 - give your kid a phone with little to no time control/oversight.

“If I'm just doing nothing all day at home, I'm bored, and I don't like to read books, because books are so, like, hard to focus on … and I just feel like I'd be a lot sadder if I didn’t have social media, because then I'd have nothing to do, like, nothing to distract me from being bored.”

That's called addiction and withdrawal.

“Social media helps, like, find the skills that you want to do, like sports.”

It makes some simple learning trivial, like learning a 30 second dance move or a new sports trick. Nothing that you couldn't find without corporate social media

“It actually places the responsibility on the teens and the parents to be the ones who are doing the work, when actually the technology companies in the first place could actually just design social media platforms that were safer and algorithms that were less risky and unsafe,” [Amber Mac] said.

Spot on. This kind of legislation can easily entrench the power the big players already have and kill access to non-corporate social media, such as the fediverse.

To my knowledge, no country currently puts the social media company as responsible for the ads it shows, for instance. Facebook/Meta projected that 10% of its 2024 revenue, roughly 16 billion dollars, came from scams. This matters because any company that turns a blind eye to fucking obvious scams wants to extract as much "value" as possible from its products (users).