It's pretty obviously a PR stunt done in bad faith to delay actual legal consequences. I don't understand why this kind of "legal" construct even exists tbh.
Another example is how the EU asked the phone manufacturers to agree on a common charger for years on a good will basis, and only had to regulate when samsung said they were going to back out if no regulation was made because apple was not playing ball.
So the idea here is "guys, we really don't want to come here and make a law about what is or isn't allowed to be said or what has to be fact checked and everything, we want you to behave like adults and agree together about said rules".
I believe in this case, the fact that every company is part of the same country and same bunch of absurdly rich tech companies means it's never going to work at all.
This is precisely the censorship policy of the PRC. It ensures that nobody ever knows for sure what speech is permitted, so no speech is completely safe. Platforms compete for users by permitting marginally legal speech and compete for the favor of regulators by censoring it. This system is much more effective at suppressing political dissent than the US system, in which censorship decisions can be challenged in open court.
The hardware and software industry has about a million standards that were collectively designed and adopted by the industry. Every single IETF RFC governing the internet and W3C RFCs governing browser standards for starters - we wouldn't be on this website having this conversation without those.
It's completely reasonable to say "multiple competing standards harms consumers with no benefit, come up with a common standard". This is what governments are supposed to do! If there is a single manufacturer not adhering to the standard it is reasonable to tell that manufacturer to comply. Is any reasonable person unhappy that we're all using common chargers for phones now?
Nor did this charger regulation seem to have negative consequences. Apple proactively licensed their wireless charging standard tech to the whole industry to get ahead of any legislation. Might not be great for Apple's profits, but I prefer that as a consumer.
In particular, right now, there are numerous credible claims of human rights violations by Israeli troops in Gaza, and widespread criticism of those violations is being labeled as anti-Semitic hate speech, correctly in some cases, while defenses of the same violations are being labeled as Islamophobic hate speech, also correctly in some cases.
These are among the reasons that hate speech is uncontroversially legal in the US.
What I am saying is that it doesn't matter weather people label others as hat speech or not because EU countries don't work by a curt of public opinion and convictions aren't based on this.
The regulations are about removing clear cases of hate speech, not about policing gray areas.
Like there is absolutely no reason to give someone who says all Jews of Muslims should be killed a platform. Or someone who main talking point is that Hitler didn't succeed in killing all, or people which systematically harass other people.
And more or less all of the things social platforms have to police are things _which anyway are already illegal_. It's just that due to the pseudo anonymity of the internet, internationalization, bots, sock puppet accounts and social platform having little reason to cooperate with the police persecuting such things in the traditional way isn't viable.
Sure making it viable would be nice, but I have to yet find a practical way which wouldn't be a form of mass surveillance much worse then such regulations.
Also both in past and presence there have been more then just a few examples about how not hindering hat speech will reliable kill innocents. There are larger examples like the genocide in Myanmar Facebook contributed to. Or smaller examples like recently a innocent teen being murdered by a mob because of people having been radicalized/riled up by hate speech on social media. Or if you want to go back to the 30th a huge part of why the Nazis gained power was that they could effectively spread hat speech and misinformation about how the Jews where at fault for everything bad (WW1, the depression in the 20th, the terms Germany had to accept at the end of WW1 etc.), or about the so called Stab-in-the-back myth, or about pseud science about how the "grate arian race" gets replaced and all mixed up etc.. The relevant part here is how effective they where able to spread this and make part of the population accept it, not whether they came up with it. (Other huge parts where that politics was too polarized to continue working and the previous conservatives helped him as an external person into power as they hoped to fix their issue of losing ground and unify Germany, in a very twisted way they did succeed, at cost of their own existence).
Then, if they're sensible, the industry creates a code of conduct that addresses the problems that drew the attention of legislators, without being too onerous; all the main players in the industry sign up and follow it; and the government doesn't have to pass legislation.
Politicians are happy because the problem goes away, and regulatory burdens on industry don't increase. Industry is happy because they get soft-touch regulation that's under their control.
It doesn't always work, of course.