People have been drinking alcohol since time immemorial. Our laws need to overcome those longstanding cultural standards that vary greatly across the globe and therefore laws will be different too.

It varies by country, but I would guess most political leaders didn't grow up in the era of social media, so there isn't some ingrained belief that kids actually need this stuff. And with growing globalization, it makes perfect sense that many new laws would be similar because they are both motivated by the same factors and can be used as examples for each other.

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asdfman123 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We didn't need social media before it existed. If no one's on it, that sounds like the ideal situation for young kids.

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philistine 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Same thing with phones in school. When it's banned by a legislature, every kid's like this is actually great six months after being enacted.

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retired 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I remember a time around 2010 where I benefitted from social media, Facebook in particular. It wasn't addictive, I used it for 15 minutes at the end of the day to catch up with what foreign family was doing, we would organize real-life parties through Facebook, share photos of those events, tag each other. If you traveled internationally it was easy to keep in touch with people you met along the way.

I'm afraid we will never get to that point anymore but I do think there was a point in society where social media was a positive addition.

	▲	fc417fc802 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It could still be like that if there was no opaque algorithm and even better if there was no endless feed to doomscroll. If you only got alerts for messages directed at you and otherwise had to actively visit a person's page to check up on them. But that wouldn't be as engaging (ie addictive) and there wouldn't be nearly as many opportunities for ads or even the collection of data to drive those ads.

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bfivyvysj 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It has nothing to do with kids or social media.

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yumraj 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> People have been drinking alcohol since time immemorial.

This is probably the reason why there is no unified age for drinking, because everyone came at it at different times from different place and have differing rationale including social, religious, cultural etc.

Social media is new and there is no cultural/religious rule for/against it. So 16 is the starting point someone decided (was it Australia or NZ?), and others are following since it's a good starting point. As time progresses, maybe it'll move up or down and different countries might take a different stand.

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