I think it's more: people are using WhatsApp (etc), presumably for a reason[0], and Facebook thinks (not necessarily falsely) that it can mislead those people t

I think it's more: people are using WhatsApp (etc), presumably for a reason[0], and Facebook thinks (not necessarily falsely) that it can mislead those people to blame their government for 'forcing' Facebook to break the software they're using. 0: That that reason is "it's a pain in the ass to migrate to something else" rather than any actual merit of WhatsApp wouldn't make this tactic this any less effective.