Name-calling now? I’ll give you the fourth option that you neglected to include:
- Kids continue to use social media despite the ban, with some using sketchy circumvention services or older friends to gain access, and with others driven to totally unsupervised social media in foreign countries and/or the dark web, with predictable results. The majority of kids rightly see the restrictions placed upon them as unreasonable and grow up with less respect for government and the law, broadly harming social trust as they enter adulthood.
It's a question of magnitudes. There will be at least one kid who does what you're saying, but how many? My strong intuition is that it'll be a small number, too small to cancel out the benefits. The appeal will be largely gone when the network effects are gone. So I say run the experiment in one country and observe the outcome and adjust accordingly. That is the least idealistic position.
As long as it’s not my country and you don’t try to apply your rules extraterritorially, fine. (And feel free to block US-hosted services if you don’t like the way we run things.)
- Kids continue to use social media despite the ban, with some using sketchy circumvention services or older friends to gain access, and with others driven to totally unsupervised social media in foreign countries and/or the dark web, with predictable results. The majority of kids rightly see the restrictions placed upon them as unreasonable and grow up with less respect for government and the law, broadly harming social trust as they enter adulthood.