Its not just about social media, the scope keeps changing and these laws are being used as a framework for mass censorship and surveillance of the entire internet. First it was just porn, now it's social media and next will probably be VPNs. And social media is a loose definition that can be expanded to include whatever you want, I'm sure at one point Australia were going to include github in their age verification law although I don't know if they followed through with that.

And sure for now we can escape to platforms like Lemmy which are free from both age verification and the general shittiness of the big platforms, but guarantee it won't stay that way for long.