No, and they can find porn on their own too. But social media services still have per-poster content ratings, and user-account age restrictions vis-a-vis viewing content with those content ratings.
The goal isn’t to protect the children, it’s CYA: to ensure they didn’t get it from you, while honestly presenting as themselves (as that’s the threshold that sets the moralists against you.)
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Such restrictions also can work as an effective censorship mechanism… presuming the child in question lives under complete authoritarian control of all their devices and all their free time — i.e. has no ability to install apps on their phone; is homeschooled; is supervised when at the library; is only allowed to visit friends whose parents enforce the same policies; etc.
For such a child, if your app is one of the few whitelisted services they can access — and the parent set up the child’s account on your service to make it clear that they’re a child and should not be able to see restricted content — then your app limiting them from viewing that content, is actually materially affecting their access to that content.
(Which sucks, of course. But for every kid actually under such restrictions, there are 100 whose parents think they’re putting them under such restrictions, but have done such a shoddy job of it that the kid can actually still access whatever they want.)
The goal isn’t to protect the children, it’s CYA: to ensure they didn’t get it from you, while honestly presenting as themselves (as that’s the threshold that sets the moralists against you.)
———
Such restrictions also can work as an effective censorship mechanism… presuming the child in question lives under complete authoritarian control of all their devices and all their free time — i.e. has no ability to install apps on their phone; is homeschooled; is supervised when at the library; is only allowed to visit friends whose parents enforce the same policies; etc.
For such a child, if your app is one of the few whitelisted services they can access — and the parent set up the child’s account on your service to make it clear that they’re a child and should not be able to see restricted content — then your app limiting them from viewing that content, is actually materially affecting their access to that content.
(Which sucks, of course. But for every kid actually under such restrictions, there are 100 whose parents think they’re putting them under such restrictions, but have done such a shoddy job of it that the kid can actually still access whatever they want.)