This is part of a focused effort. Same as the “Gasp, Pornhub is full of revenge porn and CSAM” a few years back. Ars has a good writeup of that, but the gist of it is that it led to basically every credit card company blocking business to Pornhub. Which more or less killed their premium model. And most of the human trafficking horror stories that were dug up were revealed to either be fabrications or be more “general” ones with a lot of the resulting horror going to facebook and twitter.

Same here. “Age verification” is a pretense to run campaigns to punish and destroy the companies trying to actually make good porn. Because “foreign hosts” only care if they can profit. And if the only people who CAN pay for porn are the ones who want to watch children being violently raped? Well, a lot of republican politicians like Matt “Eww, she turned 13?” Gaetz will still get their rocks off.