Get the facts

It’s the App Store Accountability Act with a new name.

The federal version wasn’t getting traction under the old name, so this year its backers renamed it. Their own website calls it “Same Foundation, New Name.” They also added a parent OK for personalized feeds, a notification curfew at bedtime and during school, and a ban on apps built to create child sexual abuse material.

The core is the same: check everyone’s age at the app store, link kids to a parent, and have the parent approve every app.

It checks ages at the app store and then stops.

Once a parent taps “approve,” the bill is done. It doesn’t touch what the app shows the kid at midnight, who messages them or how long it keeps them scrolling. It doesn’t touch the web browser either. A kid can open Safari, Chrome or Firefox, or sit down at a laptop, and log into the same sites with no check at all.

That’s where the harm is. The states that sued Meta say Instagram pushed eating-disorder and self-harm content at kids, and kept doing it after Meta’s own researchers warned about it. All of that happens inside the app.

And to check kids’ ages, the bill checks everyone’s. In Texas, adults opening a new phone account now prove their age with a credit card or a scan of their ID.

Meta, Snap and X cheered when Utah passed the first version. Grindr endorsed the federal bill. If it threatened how those companies reach kids, they’d be fighting it.

It’s one name for a whole family of bills.

Utah, Texas, Louisiana and Alabama have passed versions, and the backers now call the model the App Store Child Protection Act. Other states see the same idea under other names. California passed a different version in 2025 that has the phone itself send an age signal to apps.

They all work the same way: check ages at the store and call it done.

When you see a new bill that says it protects kids online, ask one question. Does it change what the app does once it’s on the phone, or does it stop before that? If it stops before that, it’s the same bill.

Texas is finding out.

Its law took effect June 4, 2026, after a federal appeals court let it go forward while the lawsuit continues.

Anyone in Texas opening a new account on the iPhone app store now has to prove they’re an adult, with a credit card or a scan of a government ID. Debit cards don’t count. Anyone under 18 has to be linked to a parent, who approves every download and purchase, from Instagram to the calculator. Apple warned that the law means collecting sensitive information to download any app, “even if a user simply wants to check the weather or sports scores.”

And once the parent taps “approve,” Instagram is the same app it was the day before, with the same feed and the same recommendations. Everybody got checked, and nothing changed inside the app.

Yes.

Meta’s own research was first leaked, then aired in Congress and in the state lawsuits. It showed Instagram serving eating-disorder content to girls who looked at diet posts, then serving more because they kept watching. That’s the algorithm doing its job: more time on screen means more ad money.

An app store age check never touches it. The check happens before the app is on the phone. The feed runs after, at midnight, every night.

Yes, in seconds.

Every phone has a web browser, and Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X and porn sites all work in it. This bill only covers apps downloaded from an app store. A kid told no on the Instagram app can open Safari, Chrome or Firefox and log in at instagram.com, or log in on the family computer.

Parents can lock down the browser today with the free settings already on the phone. The bill doesn’t touch it.

No.

Porn sites run in the web browser, and the big app stores already ban porn apps. So the bill checks the one door porn doesn’t use.

That’s why Pornhub’s parent company is happy to push age checks onto the app stores and phone makers. It takes the job off its own websites.

Easily.

The store checks the adult who opens the account. Kids get around that the way they always have: an older sibling’s phone, a parent’s account, a friend’s phone, a school laptop or the web browser.

The adults are the ones who can’t get around it. They hand over a credit card or an ID every time they open a new account.

No.

Picture it: midnight, a 14-year-old in bed, scrolling Instagram or TikTok. That’s where the real harm happens, in the feed, the messages and the search bar. This bill was over the day the app went on the phone.

And if the app was never approved, the kid can open Safari, Chrome or Firefox and log in anyway, or use a laptop, a school Chromebook or a friend’s phone.

This bill doesn’t protect that kid. Only a parent does: by deciding when a kid gets a phone, what’s on it and where it sleeps at night.

On paper, no. In practice, close to it.

The bill says the store has to verify your age and lets the store pick how. In Texas, that means a credit card or a scan of your government ID. Debit cards don’t count. If you don’t carry a credit card, it means your ID.

Parents get checked too. The parent on a kid’s account has to be verified as an adult.

Not the way they describe it.

To sort kids from adults, you have to check the adults. Meta’s settlement names the two ways it’ll do that: scanning IDs and scanning faces. Australia barred platforms from requiring ID alone for its under-16 law, so they switched to face scans.

The federal bill doesn’t promise privacy. It asks for a “commercially available method or process,” which means whatever a company can buy.

It sits in somebody’s files, and files get stolen.

In October 2025, Discord said about 70,000 photo IDs that users had sent in for age checks were exposed in a breach at one of its vendors. In July 2025, the app Tea said about 13,000 selfies and ID photos from its verification process were exposed.

Every age check law creates more files like that.

In Congress, Sen. Mike Lee (S.1586) and Rep. John James (H.R. 3149). In the states, Sen. Todd Weiler sponsored Utah’s and Sen. Angela Paxton carried Texas’s.

The campaign is the Digital Childhood Alliance and the Child First Policy Center. Bloomberg reported Meta was helping fund the Alliance.

Meta, Snap and X cheered Utah’s law. Pinterest and Grindr endorsed the federal bill.

Then look at who pays: the device makers run the checks, adults hand over a credit card or an ID, and parents get a permission request for every app.

Because it doesn’t cost them anything.

The bill checks ages at the app store. Their platforms work in any web browser, so a kid who doesn’t get the app can open the browser and be there in seconds. The work, the cost and the lawsuits land on the device makers. The platforms keep running the same way.

Meta, Snap and X put out a joint statement cheering Utah’s version. Grindr endorsed the federal bill by name. Pornhub’s parent company has lobbied for the same setup: age checks run by app stores and phone makers instead of by porn sites.

Bloomberg reported in July 2025 that Meta was helping fund the Digital Childhood Alliance, the group that ran the state campaigns for this bill. Google runs one of the two big app stores and has its own stake here, but it put this on the record: “We see the legislation being pushed by Meta as an effort to offload their own responsibilities to keep kids safe.”

Meta spent a record $26.29 million lobbying Congress in 2025. Its former head of safety testified that Instagram let an account rack up 16 violations for prostitution and sexual solicitation before suspending it on the 17th. Reuters reported that Meta’s own rules let its chatbots have “romantic or sensual” conversations with kids.

That’s the company helping write your state’s child safety bill.

From a poll the Digital Childhood Alliance commissioned. Bloomberg reported Meta was helping fund the Alliance.

As the backers describe it, the poll asked whether app stores should require a parent’s approval before a kid downloads an app. Every iPhone and Android phone can already do that for free.

Ask to see the exact questions, and whether anyone asked parents if they’d hand over a credit card or ID to download a weather app.

No.

We don’t care which company runs the ID check. We care that the check exists at all, and that it lets the platforms that built the harm off the hook.

We’re harder on Meta than the bill’s sponsors are. Make the company that built the product answer for what the product does.

No.

In August 2026, about a week into trial, Meta agreed to pay up to $16.7 billion over ten years. That settled claims from 52 state and territorial attorneys general that it built Instagram and Facebook to hook kids and hid what it knew. Meta admitted nothing. In New Mexico, a jury found Meta broke the state’s consumer protection law, and a judge then added more, for a total of $942 million. Meta is appealing.

A lot of the evidence is Meta’s own. A 2019 internal report, shown in court by the FTC, found Instagram had recommended 2 million kids’ accounts to accounts Meta had flagged as groomers, in three months. Reuters reported on the chatbot rules. Its former head of safety testified about the 17-strike rule.

Now Meta calls its settlement “the right path forward for our whole industry” while the groups pushing this bill lobby your statehouse. Meta should be answering for what it did, not helping write the rules.

Of course it knows.

Meta asks for your birthday when you sign up, uses a teen’s age to decide which ads to show them, and says it’s building technology to catch teens who claim to be adults.

Internal documents shown in court go further. A 2018 Meta youth plan was built around “Kids, Tweens, and Teens.” Another plan tested whether “school blasts” could get a whole high school onto the platform. Meta says the lawsuits cherry-pick its documents.

In its August settlement, Meta agreed to check users’ ages itself and to stop sending kids notifications during school.

So when a witness tells your committee the app store is better at checking ages than Instagram, that’s an argument against something Meta already agreed to do. The app store version just makes it somebody else’s job.

It brought in something worse.

Age checks now apply to every Instagram and Facebook user in the settling states, with no bill and no vote. The methods it names are ID scans and face scans. It also commits Meta to using age signals from phones and app stores.

That’s this bill’s setup, delivered by a court settlement. Anyone still pushing the bill is pushing something that already exists.

No.

In July 2026 it let Texas keep enforcing its law while the court fight goes on. It gave no reasons and didn’t decide whether the law is constitutional.

A federal judge in Austin said the law likely violates the First Amendment. An appeals panel thinks Texas will likely win. Nobody has ruled for good.

Same problem, different route.

The Kids Online Safety Act says it doesn’t require age verification. But it holds platforms responsible for users they “know” are minors, including what they should have figured out. The safe move for a platform is to check everybody.

Sen. Rand Paul blocked a fast-track vote on it this fall for that reason. The House passed its own package, the KIDS Act, which requires age checks for sites heavy with sexual content. And Axios reported Meta dropped its opposition to KOSA this year as part of a deal that would have put age checks on the app stores.

Nothing that a parent already does.

We’re not pushing a bill. We’re asking lawmakers not to pass ones that don’t work and don’t protect anybody.

Before you co-sponsor anything, read it. Ask who it actually restricts, and why the companies closest to the harm aren’t fighting it.

Stay out of the ID business. A bill that makes every adult prove who they are to download an app trades away everyone’s privacy for a checkpoint a kid gets around with a web browser.

Killing a bad bill in committee protects more kids than passing a good-sounding one.

Parents already have it.

Every iPhone and Android phone has free parental controls. Ask to Buy and Family Link make a kid ask before adding any app. Screen time limits, website filters and the oldest tool of all, deciding when a kid gets a phone, work today without a new law. We collect what works and hand it out.

What parents can’t control is the feed. The apps are built to keep kids watching: endless scroll, autoplay, and recommendations that get more extreme because extreme holds attention. Good parenting doesn’t fix a product designed that way.

This bill leaves the feed alone. The state lawsuits against Meta go after how the product is built, and that’s where the pressure belongs.

Five things, all free:

Turn on Ask to Buy (iPhone) or Family Link (Android) so no new app goes on without you.

Set website limits in the same settings so the browser isn’t a back door.

Charge phones outside the bedroom at night.

Open any app yourself before you say yes. Look at the messages, the search bar and who can contact your kid.

Talk to your kids about what they see. They’ll tell you more than any setting will.

Right to Parent is an advocacy group.

State lawmakers keep getting handed model bills that sound like they protect kids and don’t. Nobody was giving them a second opinion before the vote, so we started doing it.

Parents already have the authority to run their kids’ technology. They don’t need a new law to do it.

We publish one-pagers, fact sheets, toolkits and testimony templates. We share stories from families who solved this without a new law. And we tell you what’s moving in your state before it passes.

Our toolkits focus on where the real risk is: the design tricks apps use to keep kids hooked, like endless scroll, push notifications and feeds that keep escalating. Meta’s own research, made public through leaks and lawsuits, shows how those tricks work.

You’re in the right place. Search this library or pick a category above. Every fact sheet has a one-page PDF you can print or send to a lawmaker.

Then get involved: contact us, join the coalition and share this with people you know. We add new resources all the time.