>instagram and the like are uniquely and disastrously harmful

-to both adults and children. What kind of worked for cigarettes was the huge tax so why not create a "mental health tax" based on the number of users x some addictiveness score and let meta either fix instagram, pay their users a therapy or pass the cost to them.

Instead this "protecting children" by giving them "degraded" experience will only motivate them to bypass the age verification and destroy the statistical evidence of the harm those platforms cause.