The law correctly anticipates that teenagers would get it on. It did not anticipate that they would create and exchange explicit images of themselves. In retrospect, that's an obviously bad assumption, but it wasn't so obvious when photography required high cost/skills/turnaround time. It was assumed that photographer/exploiter and subject/victim were different.

Not sure how you fix it (other than to educate youth and setup technical blocks). I suspect in most cases that police, prosecutors, and other adults "apply common sense", but some prosecutors will do anything to get re-elected (a nude selfie doesn't necessarily ruin a teen's life, but a criminal conviction for it surely will).

Right, age of consent is 16 in most of the US, so you could meet up and do all sorts of things, but if you take a picture of your consensual sex you are a felon. Hmmmmmm...

The law makes sense though from one perspective, as silly as this sounds. Having sex is far less worse than a video/picture of you naked, which may exist on the internet for a very, very long time. Think Amanda Todd and it being used as blackmail; the added threat of it being child porn is a real turn off.

Of course you then wonder how much can change in just 2 years, but if you're legally an adult, and you consented to the image, it won't be classed as child porn, but revenge porn laws are a thing.

But the easiest solution is not to consent to being filmed/photographed if you don't want to be...With how google photos uploads automatically the second you take a picture I don't trust smartphones these days...

I'm not sure a picture of you on the internet is a bigger responsibility to assume than creating a child, so I don't really think the law makes that much sense even in that perspective.

If we're honest, a lot of the laws were made so far away from the context of the current internet/smartphone culture that they are pretty much useless unless seriously reconsidered (and probably do a lot of immoral harm the way they are written right now).