Porn is a product designed to draw in consumers, and with social media the business is either targeting marketing to the pool of consumers, or getting the consumers to sign up for some kind of paid monthly plan. Generally speaking, everyone agrees that there should be some kind of regulation of products for various reasons. With porn, the main issue is that the only performers should be consenting adults. The fact that some buyers of social media ad services don't want to be affiliated with porn content is a market issue, not a regulatory issue.<p>Note also this is hardly the only controversial class of content. Consider two others: the manufacture of weapons and explosives, and the manufacture of drugs. These also break down on the legal/illegal boundary.<p>For example, with weapons, what's allowed? YT is full of videos on how to reload gun ammunition, for example, but when it comes to home synthesis of gunpowder needed to reload those cartidges, using the well-known historical recipe (charcoal, saltpetre, sulfur), it seems those are all taken down under 'YT community guidelines'. Curiously, automatic weapons or machine guns (including disassembly and repair) are also all over YT, even though owning such weapons without a license is about as illegal as home synthesis of explosives is.<p>Another example: drug chemistry. Aspirin is common household medication and is synthesized by the reaction of salicylic acid (from willow bark) with acetic anhydride (basically, dehydrated vinegar). There are no shortage of detailed walk-through videos on how to do this reaction on YT. However, if we simply replace the willow bark extract with opium extract (i.e. morphine), we are now making heroin, diacetylated morphine. No such hands-on walk-through videos seem to exist on YT, or for say, the conversion of coca leaves to cocaine sulfate paste to cocaine hydrochloride or freebase cocaine (i.e. crack). There are of course, no such restrictions on videos about the fermentation of agricultural products and the distillation of the result into strong liquors (does YT block this in Muslim countries?). Growing cannabis is currently a kind of grey area.<p>It seems that social media companies want their user-uploaded content to be in line with the regulatory norms of their viewer's host government (and perhaps more fuzzy concepts like local social norms), but those norms, globally speaking, are all over the map.