Irrespective of the incidental value "Meta" provides, let's keep in mind that no business has a right to exist independently from its standing in the system of laws and the health of its users - especially children. Social media companies argue that they can't monitor every post and do appropriate age verification online because it would be "impossible to scale". Well, tough luck. Not being able to scale is YOUR prob…
As a parent of a now-13 year old, I’m disappointed that COPPA hasn’t been updated after companies have gone aggressively after children. I was shocked over the summer when I received an email saying I was going to lose some of the Xbox controls we have in place, as if 13 was some milestone of maturity and self-control. AFAICT, I’m legally responsible for my children until they’re 18, and at least at the moment, they…
COPPA was the culmination of a series of progressively more narrow attempts to restrict internet content and practices using “think of the children” as a justification, the previous efforts were, but for some standalone bits (like Section 230, which survived from the mostly-unconstitutional Communications Decency Act) struck down as unconstitutional, which is why there haven't been attempts to update it with more broadly applicable restrictions—its already the outcome of a process of backing off to the maximal constitutional restriction (OTOH, with a socially conservative Supreme Court that is unusually unconcerned with respecting precedent, I suppose now would be the time, if you wanted to do that.)