Why do people want social media/smartphone bans for minors/age verifications?

Society has had a very long tendency to start moral panics over new technology, claiming they are harmful for younger people. The earliest example was a moral panic over dime novels, where Puritians claimed they would corrupt the minds of younger people's brains in the 1870s. By the 1890s, the panic went away. Later examples included TV, video games, comic books, DND, amusement parks, junk food, and radio. These panics also went away within 5-10 years after they began, and society would eventually move on to newer panics.

What makes this smartphone/social media panic weird is that neither product are really that new anymore, as they have been in the mainstream for over 20 years. It only appears this panic has gotten worse and worse over time rather than getting better. That's entirely unprecedented and there is no other panic that can even compare to this social media panic.

What's even weirder is that this panic appears to have happened twice. The initial panic over social media happened roughly around 2006 to 2009, back when MySpace was the main social media site. Even that panic was tame compared to now. There were only relatively few people who wanted MySpace to ban minors under an absurdly high age like 16 or even 18 from the website, or require age verification software for everyone on the website. The suggestions were that MySpace should improve the safety of minors on the site or that parents should tell their kids to stop using MySpace and use a safer alternative called Facebook instead. That panic died out by 2010 due to MySpace losing popularity.

The social media panic was then largely inactive from roughly 2010 to 2021, and I only recall few people expressing concern about minors using social media and smartphones.

The hardest thing to exactly figure out is how the social media panic became active again and managed to actually become far worse than ever before around 2022/2023. I am entirely unaware of a similar panic over a new technology/entertainment with younger people that faced the same scenario as the social media panic.

I genuinely do not understand who exactly the panic (and the associated bans) are supposed to appeal to. Parents could already have restricted their kids from using social media with parental controls or setting their own boundaries and rules. That only really further begs the question on who the panic appeals to; Parents just restrict their 5 to 7-year-olds from social media and install parental control software, yet society instead wants government and company interference with technology access to minors as old as 15-17.