What was their justification for this?
Seems to me this is an automated process to guarantee some profit margin for them. Not saying this is correct, though.
The green area of Antarctica according to the graph in this link is 12 km². The area of Antarctica is 14,200,000 km², i.e. 0.0008% is green. Seems like a noise data point.
You lost me when you used WhatsApp and "mastered the art of providing secure encryption " on the same sentence. Even Signal is known on hacker circles as the CIA app. The problem is in the hardware, not software.