You are absolutely right, and you have indavertebtly hit the nail on the head. This legilsation is supported by parents who would like their children to be able to use the internet, all of it, without any effort on their part to police their children's online habits. There are many parents who give their kids smartphones at 10 years old, or younger, and create Google and Facebook/Insta accounts with fake ages for their kids to use, and let them at it. No supervision, no discussion, no parental controls. This renders any action on the part of the tech companies moot, as parents are proving that their pre-teen kids are adults by providing false information. Kids then go online, go into Snapchat or whatever, cue torrent of DPs and grooming. Quelle surprise!
Schools in the UK spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with this, and in almost every case it turns out parents have no idea what their kids are sending/seeing online.
So the result is that bad parents demand bad legislation so that they can, in their minds, transfer responsibility for parenting their kids to the state. The state, well meaning rather than malicious, massively overreaches in its attempt to provide an answer. As a result everyone else suffers. And the 'majority of the public' think parents should parent, rather than making it the government's problem, and butt out of their internet.
Welcome to life in a society. We pick winners which by extension creates losers.
So you would be arguing that we shouldn't protect children from social media which is causing significant harm to them because it might inconvenience a minority of adults.
Schools in the UK spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with this, and in almost every case it turns out parents have no idea what their kids are sending/seeing online.
So the result is that bad parents demand bad legislation so that they can, in their minds, transfer responsibility for parenting their kids to the state. The state, well meaning rather than malicious, massively overreaches in its attempt to provide an answer. As a result everyone else suffers. And the 'majority of the public' think parents should parent, rather than making it the government's problem, and butt out of their internet.