The media buzz around the ills of social media are certainly tied to moderation, as well as other problems with the governance of those sites: people are really worried about the kind of offensive content that is easily accessible to, and recommended to, children. There is some recognition that the harmful suggestion algorithms are at fault, but the fact that such content is hosted at all is also a moderation problem.

>Age verification will be a significant loss for social media companies. It's going to push plenty of people away, and it provides no information that they don't already know to a reasonably high degree of certainty.

It may push some people away (though with the centralisation of the internet, I think this is easy to overstate), but the social media companies probably aren't that worried. Their bigger threat is actual legislation and punishment. Age-gating prevents the government from coming down on them for bad moderation, since they can just block users from accessing anything that might need to be moderated otherwise.

The possibility that age verification will actually give them more data or let them track you more easily is a nice little plus, but this is more stick than carrot.