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Social media's 'big tobacco' moment has arrived. Last month, in two separate court cases, juries in California and New Mexico held social media companies liable for harming young people using their products. With more than 1,500 similar cases pending in California alone, these results are significant both for the precedent they set and for the details revealed in damning evidence. The Los Angeles case marked the first time in history social media companies - specifically Meta and YouTube - have been held responsible for designing platforms that intentionally addicted, and then harmed, a child.

The jury heard that Meta's internal communications compared the platform's operations to pushing drugs, while an internal YouTube memo had reportedly described "viewer addiction" as a corporate goal. In the same week these cases were decided, Bill Ready, CEO of Pinterest, another social media giant, declared that "social media, as it's configured today, is not safe for young people under 16", and our own House of Lords voted for a second time in decisive terms to adopt a cross-party proposal that would ban harmful social media platforms from dealing with children aged under 16.

Yet Labour ministers - who on Thursday forced their MPs to vote down (for the second time) the cross-party proposal from the Lords - continue to do all they can to resist this sensible, widely-supported and long-overdue measure to protect British children.

Instead, the government's preferred response to one of the defining issues of our times is to divert attention with a clutch of poorly thought-out and misguided counterproposals: a three-month consultation, a "national conversation", and a series of pilot schemes involving a statistically almost irrelevant group of 300 families.

The consultation, in the words of Lord Nash, one of the peers fighting for better regulation, is "a shocker". It's based on the premise that technology has to be a necessary part of all children's lives from "an early age" and that engaging with that online world "safely", rather than working out which platforms and services are so pernicious they shouldn't be part of kids' lives.

The 62 questions it poses to parents and children are unwieldy, biased and leading, in places emphasising the perceived benefit of social media whilst downplaying harm, and referencing a flimsy and occasionally non-existent evidential base when asserting that benefit. One especially eyebrow-raising question asks children as young as 10 whether social media platforms should enable users under 16 to "send nude images or videos / connect or talk to strangers / location share". Seriously?!

The government's pilots - to test social media bans, time limits and digital curfews in those 300 teenage homes - are just as bad and quite probably pointless. Any pilot for a ban will have to operate as a blanket ban, rather than a smarter, targeted measure to tackle the harmful features of platforms. A false negative result from that pilot seems inevitable.

The case for time limits, anyway problematic, should have been dealt a fatal blow by the US litigation. If children were allowed to smoke "only" three cigarettes per day, would that be okay?

As for those participating in the final pilot scheme, who will have their social media blocked between 9pm and 7am, what exactly is this meant to test - that children fare better when they sleep? Baroness Cass, a sage voice on these issues in the House of Lords, suggested these pilots would not stand up to scientific scrutiny, and how right she will be.

Pilots, consultations and a national conversation might have been a reasonable response in a world where evidence of harm was uncertain.

Arguably, that point passed half a decade or more ago, but with hundreds of children killed in incidents linked to social media use and thousands of others harmed, with the addiction-fostering features of these products now exposed in two different courts, and with Silicon Valley execs publishing mea culpas, it has certainly passed now.

The government's feeble diversionary response represents precisely the wrong policy choices, at exactly the right moment for meaningful action. They put a government already on the back foot into full throttle reverse mode and risk exposing a further generation of children to known and preventable harm.

Molly Kingsley is co-founder of parent-led campaign group UsForThem