You may not be aware of this, but Meta has been actively spending millions of dollars to redirect the rage against their algorithms and addictive harms, especially against children, and one of their strategies to try and help avoid liability is to put the onus on the federal government to pass ID legislation, to literally make it easier for Meta and similar companies to age gate most content under simple blanket policies. The way that they are doing this is by funding otherwise very small "parents rights organizations" with money and connections they otherwise wouldn't have. What does Meta gain from this? Less liability and lower cost in content moderation. What do the parents rights groups get? "Check ID laws".
That's enough motivation for both groups, it's very simple.
Now where do you get into "conspiracy theory" territory? Well thetr are also other groups that want online ID for their own purposes, and they are more than happy to help fund these groups to get something they also want.
All of this is very easy to provide backing links for with a simple Google search, if you're interested.
How should online services be regulated to mitigate algorithmic harms? To get something over the line politically, it needs to be simple enough that it can be articulated in a few sentences.
That would be a good conversation to have!
Instead what is happening is moneyed interests are inputting hundreds of millions of dollars into organizations that otherwise wouldn't have it, which is giving an "unnatural" amount of political influence to those groups, which is changing our country, and not just on this issue. They're literally doing it just to keep their money, and ID checks let them keep it without actually reducing the harms.