The only entities that can possibly control Facebook and Google are nation-states. If there is to be any regulation of them (or the content they push) at all, that's where it has to happen. These giant tech companies have demonstrated that they don't care to do it themselves. Of course individuals can decide to use these platforms or not, but if that was good enough to achieve the society most of us want to live in, we wouldn't need 90% of the laws we currently have.
Sadly nation states, or at least the ones acting currently, seem to think the only thing available is a banned or not binary. There’s no nuance to laws because nuance is hard to get into a 1 paragraph sound bite for the media.
We’re seeing the same thing in the UK currently with fuzzy definitions of what does and doesn’t need age verification, and even what verification means, and that’s leading to completely harmless communities shutting down to avoid having to risk being in the wrong while the megacorps just hoover up some more metadata about users.
Banning inappropriate things, whether media, alcohol, smoking, driving, etc. for young people is pretty much the long-established way of regulating what they do.
