It's frustrating how often 'journalism' assumes good faith and uses the language and arguments of corporations.

Rather than "fleeing age-verification" myself, and I largely assume others, are "fleeing surveillance state data harvesting".

Yeah, I'm 39 years old, I don't need to flee age verification. I just am not interested in having an account on a chat service that would do this. I don't want my driver's license and biometric information to be stored in servers who-knows-where in a country with weak privacy regulations.

This is an extremely rational position.