You mean the people's rights to lure and attack my children? It's not a rhetorical question, it is exactly what is currently happening (and not only with children but okay).
It's silly to say "Get better at parenting", when parents who have no specialist training, are literally facing off against trillion-dollar companies with thousands of industrial psychologists and data scientists hell-bent on making their products as addictive and profitable as possible.
There are huge information- and power asymmetries at play here. Just shouting: "Parent your kids" better is simplistic, stupid and wrong IMHO.
It takes a village to raise a child. It's all well and good for childless techbros to say "Raise your kids" properly, and be subject to the tender mercies of the tech giants, but we stand a fighting chance if parents, schools, child development specialists etc, rally to get some common-sense controls in place.
The internet is a free fire zone today. This needs to change, and techbros just saying "Be a better parent" is a lazy, cynical cop-out.
Now, kids have phones and Internet-connected devices and the whole world can reach them 24/7, and that includes a lot of creeps.
The CEO of Roblox is probably the single easiest example to point at; when confronted about his platforms issues when it comes to enabling child abuse, the first response he had was to claim that child predators were an untapped market and then claim to be interested in adding a dating site feature to Roblox.
That's the kind of rethoric these bad laws are a response to, and is the elephant in the room that a lot of the tech industry fails to recognize. (Including the privacy advocates, for whom every nail looks like it has a hammer shaped solution.) Age verification isn't a good solution to this problem, but it at least forces the hands of these companies to address it if they don't want to face jailtime for knowingly abetting predators - they can't pretend to have clean hands anymore if they're mandated to verify user ages.
There's almost certainly better solutions, but that's also why attestation (where the source device transmits the user's age, rather than storing a ton of PII of them elsewhere) misses the mark. Attestation doesn't fix that problem.
Most child abductions and abuse[0] are from within the family or by people known to the child. Internet strangers are the absolute least of your worries.
[0] At least in the UK
The California law basically mandates devices (including Linux) to have a parental controls mode and mandates apps to obey them under penalty of law.
Frankly, this is nonsense. European countries like Germany or Switzerland of France find it completely normal for their kids to walk to school without parents (at 6 or even 5 years old) or to play outside without parents. That is responsible parenting and good for kids themselves.
The American idea that parents must not let kids out of their sight until they are 18 is absurd. And then again, even Americans complain about it, because it is nonsense to Americans too - it is just that rhetorical device to blame the victim rather then the perpetrator.
If you don't want kids using social media, set up a network filter. But if you want to have mandatory ID for social media to "protect kids", but you have no trouble letting your kid go outside and get up to who knows what (they're absolutely going to be browsing the internet on their "cool friend's" computer and doing devilish things like saying naughty words on reddit), then I think anyone who really believes that needs to post their ID as proof. Because it's a very contradictory and inorganic thought process.
Serious topic, don't do that.
Protecting children is hard. Generations of parents have been put under loads of pointless stress so that they leave lots of education to "the system" and it's clerks, most of which were only good enough at their jobs. Things developed, and mistakes of deliberately mislead parents were conventionally framed as life and life's lessons.
We are talking about thousands of kids/adolescents raped every party weekend in US and Europe ( rape is jut one extreme example ).
The role of social media in the mere exposure effect to character types and behavioral patterns is obvious--and probably well studied--but "it's just social media - raise your kids well and stop blaming others" works about as well as outlining how certain pop segments were sabotaged for decades and couldn't even exert the free will to do things better/differently--even though they noticed the premises and conclusions of certain problems--because it went against the advice of figures who were perceived as authoritative.