On that same note, I tend to be cynical about these things, so–and maybe this was already implied in your post–I view the social media (SM) companies’ moves as mostly CYA. Yes, as you said, losing these users will hurt business to some extent. But I suspect they can weather that minor storm just fine, given how immense these companies are.

And if they didn’t do anything by this point, they would be on the hook for major criticism, and even significant potential liability. So I would expect they just did a standard cost-benefit analysis and arrived at the obvious conclusion.

Finally, given that Ds are in ascendance–that’s especially clear now after the GA runoffs–why wouldn’t the companies want to earn some brownie points from Ds for doing what was in the companies’ own interest anyway? If they are in the Ds’ good graces, that makes it easier to head off or at least water down any regulation that might be in the offing. I know some Ds–including Biden himself–have also made rumblings about regulation. (FWIW, my take is there may be some room for adjustments in this field, but it’s sort of beyond may grade and what I would really like to see is data privacy legislation; the latter is probably doubtful though…)