From my understanding, only federal criminal charges (and convictions) can be pardoned anyway, whereas I believe this is a state civil case (a lawsuit).

They've been pushing it for ages, especially the "ID yourself for adult content" laws.

It's partly to indeed combat the AI/machine noise of the internet, but also to improve their own dataset of people. What kind of porn you watch. What kind of "adult" products you buy (soon to include knives, kitchen and garden tools, etc., because "blade"), they want to know EVERYTHING.

Not just so your ads can be targeted, but because these companies want to replace governments, and that data will be extremely useful to push people into specific roles.

Oh, you're a rebellious anarchist? Well enjoy the shitty life or we tell people about your kinks - and I 100% guarantee there will be fabricated ones too. Everyone has secrets, and these companies want to learn them all to have absolute control over you.

There are many reasons for that.

Meta wants to choose which regulations are applied to all social media platforms because they know which regulations they and their competition can/not easily comply with. They want to make themselves look trustworthy for regulating themselves, while mitigating AI scrapers and fake accounts throwing off their engagement metrics, while giving themselves very lax regulations, while also weaponizing our government to apply burdensome regulations to their competitors.

Reduced on appeal to $20, an apology letter, and 3 hours of community service.