There’s a political movement that gained steam in the EU to make social media companies responsible for the content they deliver.

Which make sense since the same social media companies want the right to moderate what they want.
What happen is that the social media companies on one hand say “the network is ours, so we can remove what we don’t want” and on the other hand say “we are not responsible for what the user write” but you cannot have both.

This would have meant they’d have to implement robust age verification on their platforms to comply with EU youth protection laws (including fines per child that could access unsuitable content).

Or simply say “look we are not touching anything is published, we are a medium. That content is illegal ? Fine, here the data we have to identify the user and if a judge say so, we will remove it since it is illegal”. Nobody think to accuse or fine a telephone company because a pedo uses a their network to commit crimes.

So they lobbied for delegating the age verification to the OS level instead. That way they can continue to push harmful, addictive slop to children without being legally responsible. They can just say “we check the age provided by the OS”.

Maybe, but if the OS say that the user is a minor and they show the content anyway they are responsible.