Congress is once again debating whether app stores should be required to verify ID before allowing anyone, of any age, to download an app. The App Store Accountability Act, introduced more than a year ago by Rep. John James (R-MI) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), would force app stores to verify a user’s age and secure parental consent before a minor could install anything. James and Lee say the bill is aimed at protecting children from predators and addictive content.
“Kids cannot consent, and any company that exposes them to addictive or adult material should be held accountable,” James said when the bill was introduced. “The App Store Accountability Act holds Big Tech companies to the same standard as local corner stores.”
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That goal is widely shared. But the bill’s age-verification mandate would apply to every app in the store, not just the social media platforms lawmakers say they’re targeting, and that’s where the trouble starts for conservatives.
PROGRESSIVES EMPOWER THE AMERICAN ISLAMIST PIPELINE
Turning Point USA, the youth organizing group Charlie Kirk built before his death, runs an app that underpins its “Club America” network of high school chapters, much of it organized through X, Instagram, and Facebook. The National Rifle Association has an app, too. So do Fox News, Newsmax, the Daily Caller, the Daily Wire, and the outlets under the Salem Media umbrella.
Under the bill, a 16-year-old couldn’t download any of those apps without a parent first going through an identity check, the same barrier Congress says it wants to put up against the platforms it’s actually worried about.
It’s not a hypothetical concern for conservatives. Kirk himself was credited with helping change President Donald Trump’s mind on TikTok, nudging him toward embracing the platform during the 2024 campaign. The same online infrastructure that does that kind of persuasion work, on apps and platforms young people use every day, is what the bill would put behind a parental consent wall.
Several states have already moved on similar legislation, with mixed results in court. California, Louisiana, Texas, and Utah all passed their own versions of an App Store Accountability Act last year. A federal judge in Louisiana ruled that the state’s law was unconstitutional, finding it violated the First Amendment. Texas’s law is now pending before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Shoshana Weissmann, digital director and policy adviser at the Abundance Institute, said the legal problems aren’t going away.
“Courts have long established that adults and children alike have First Amendment rights to access and engage in free speech,” Weissmann said. “With narrow exceptions, these rights cannot be conditioned on parental consent.”
There’s also a philosophical tension for Republicans backing the bill. Critics note that a government-mandated, ID-based gatekeeping system for app downloads looks a lot like the regulatory model used in countries the GOP doesn’t typically hold up as examples.
Australia is the test case most often cited. The country banned social media for users under 16, and early data suggest the policy hasn’t had much effect. A survey of 1,027 young Australians from Australian Policy Online found 61% reported almost no change to their social media use since the ban took effect, while just 26% said it had a significant effect.
Shane Tews, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a board member of the Internet Education Foundation, said that tracks with what’s known about how teenagers behave online.
“We know about the dark web, it’s only a couple clicks away once you start figuring out how to fake yourself on a social media program,” Tews said.
Despite that record, Canada and the U.K. are both moving toward even broader bans on app use for under-16s.
The U.K.’s rollout of the Online Safety Act offers a preview of what enforcement will actually look like. Teenagers have been getting around facial-recognition age checks with printed photos, face paint, and even hand-drawn mustaches, and the issue hasn’t been confined to social media. Platforms from Spotify to Wikipedia have dealt with the same workarounds. The only way to close that gap completely is to require a government-issued ID at the point of download, which is its own can of worms.
That’s because age-verification systems have become a prime target for hackers. Discord disclosed a leak last year affecting roughly 70,000 users after a third-party vendor it used to verify ages in the U.K. was breached. A federal mandate covering every app in the U.S. would multiply that exposure many times over.
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For groups like Turning Point USA and the NRA, app downloads and push notifications are part of how they build membership, organize supporters, and reach young Americans on the issues they care about. An age-verification mandate would put a parental consent step in front of all of that, alongside the conservative media outlets that rely on the same access.
None of this means the underlying concern is wrong. Parents do have reason to worry about what their teens see online, and they’re best positioned to set those boundaries. But a law that treats a weather app, a gun rights organization’s app, and a social media platform the same way creates a single point of failure, both for the conservative ecosystem the bill’s backers say they want to protect and for the personal data of every family that complies with it. Before going further down a road already traveled by Australia, Canada, and the U.K., lawmakers might want to look harder at whether this bill solves the problem it’s aimed at or just creates new ones.
Taylor Millard is a freelance journalist who lives in Virginia. Follow him on X @TaylorMillard.
