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Why is this bad? What is the upside of anyone under 16 using social media?
EDIT: the last 20 years have been an experiment in online anonymity, and the result is a dead internet infested by AI bots and foreign disinformation. At this point, I think civilized nations with free-speech protections should experiment with this sort of thing.
I would argue that the internet has died partly as a result of removing anonymity from the internet, not because of it. The massive centralization of the internet into corporate walled gardens where they can control the narrative is what made your criticisms possible. The early internet was a wild west where you could find anything and everything, for better and worse.
The big issue I have with this is that it isolates queer kids from any sense of community. Trans kids can't avoid permanent damage from the wrong puberty if they don't have access to the knowledge that they could be taking puberty blockers. Without access to that community, I didn't even learn that trans people existed and I could put a word to that existential distress until I was in college.
I somehow managed to delete my long-winded reply while I was typing it, so I'm gonna try to condense it down into something semi coherent.
In short, it's not the anonymity that I'm arguing for (though I think there's a very important debate to be had about the erosion of privacy through removing anonymity on the net), but the strengths of social platforms on the internet that are being abused by bots and AI slop. I think that a blanket ban is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We need to regulate the bad actors somehow and moderate the amount of social media that kids use, but to effectively ban kids from being able to interact with people outside of their local communities is a bad precedent.
The big strength of the internet (and why it's so important in empowering oppressed groups like the queer community) is in the ability to connect people and rapidly spread information regardless of distance. They want to take over TikTok because it's been credited as a major platform in dispelling the Israeli funded myths about the genocide of the Palestinians. Protests of college students broke out on campuses all over the US over colleges getting funding from Israel and the production and sale of weaponry. That didn't just appear out of nowhere, that information was spread through social media in real time. You can't get that from a book at the local library (you should still support your local library though, they do so much for a community beyond being a source of knowledge). But this rapid spread of information is exactly what makes the AI slop and all the other garbage (ads, misinformation, the list goes on and on) such a problem, because the bad stuff makes money for the big corporations who run the social media platforms we use. But that doesn't mean we should ban a tool because people use it maliciously or excessively to the point of harm. Nobody is calling for a ban on TV for kids under 16 despite it having a negative effect on our attention span and being filled with channels like Fox News.
Plus, I am always wary of these "protect the children" campaigns because they are often a false flag to actually restrict minorities' rights - often queer people. You see this most prominently with porn bans, but stuff like this that allows a government/group to better censor information and control the narrative come up time and time again. There was an attempt not long ago to get rid of Massachusetts' multi-grade standardized test program called the MCAS. Standardized testing has its issues, but the groups pushing for the removal had no plans to replace it with any form of statewide teaching standards or anything, they just wanted to be able to teach kids that evolution is fake and gay kids go to Hell.
I hate to tell you this, but I think this is a Florida issue. Florida is one of the worst states in a country that has been fighting against intelligence for decades now. Boomers but proudly illiterate is exactly what those in power - especially people like DeSantis - want. But the same internet that allows this to happen can also be used to give these kids a better chance. I go on YouTube and see videos of people making a fully working jet engine out of a can of Coke or a hobbyist launching a 3d printed rocket that breaks the sound barrier. I see kids learning about orbital mechanics and reentry heating through Kerbal Space Program and simple circuitry through Red Stone Minecraft tutorials. I see trans elders supporting trans kids who may otherwise never make it to adulthood - sometimes even to the point of telling them their legal rights and helping them get out of abusive households. I see up to the minute medical research news coming from furries who worked on the COVID vaccines on Bluesky. I see so much art, music, and support for passion projects that introduce people to interests that they never knew they had. And I would never want to take all that from kids.