A Reddit user traced $2 billion in nonprofit grants and lobbying records across 45 states to figure out who's behind the age verification bills. The answer involves a company that profits from your data writing laws that collect more of it

Meta itself wasn’t directly voting for age verification. They started lobbying for age verification on the OS level as soon as the whole topic came up. I would argue that they did it, because the OS now needs to handle all sensitive and technical stuff for verification and Meta gets a new verified tracking point (the age) sent from the OS to the platform.