Half-baked thought, inspired by the Australian government considering whether GitHub might be a social network and therefore damaging to children:

I have yet to hear of any government trying to distinguish between emancipatory (personal agency increasing) technology and manipulative (personal agency decreasing) technology, and so absurdities like this are inevitable.

The problem isn’t young people doing things in general. It’s capital’s relatively unrestricted ability to coax people (not just young people) into behaving in whatever ways are most profitable.

We can argue about whether it would be excessive to have a regulatory commission investigating dark UI patterns or whatever, but that would be way more in line with the reality of where these harms come from.