Comment by wongarsu

Especially since different countries/cultures have very different sentiments on most topics. For example Western Europe and the US mostly agree that minors should be protected against alcohol, drugs, pornography and excessive violence, but the thresholds are wildly different.

Europeans like to joke about the Americans being fine with gratouitious violence in kids movies as long as there's no blood, but a single female nipple immediately makes it R rated. Now consider that even France and England have different nuances on what is considered acceptable. If you extend beyond Western culture it becomes even more diverse. In some of the more religious Muslim countries a women shaking her full head of hair might be seen as erotic content. A lot of Japanese anime skirts very close to sexualizing children (from a Western perspective).

If every country became serious about enforcing age verification for their value system you could post barely any image or video content without marking it as age restricted for some jurisdiction. And the lines wouldn't neatly follow communities but you really would need a judgement for each piece of content. That's obviously not going to happen, so you will always have people from one place visiting communities in places that are more lax on one specific measure they are interested in.

And that's assuming all software and platform operators want to follow the restrictions, despite the obvious profit motive of not doing so. Restricting the supply isn't completely useless, but also provides huge incentives for those able to meet demand