> Am I the only one cynically thinking that "Russia, Iran, DPRK, PRC, etc" is the "But think of the chiiildren!!!" excuse for doing this?

Maybe. But until I dropped all traffic from pretty much every mobile network provider in Russia and Israel, I'd get up every morning to a couple of thousand new users of whom a couple of hundred had consistently within a few hundred milliseconds created an account, clicked on the activation link, and then posted a bunch of messages in every forum category spreading hate speech.