September 21, 2026
Focus on the Family Just Made Meta’s Case for the App Store Accountability Act, Complete With a Prayer Request at the End
Because nothing says “What Would Jesus Do” like a prayer chain for a bill the world’s largest social media company helped push
By: Brian Lenney
Take a look at this…
Focus on the Family recently ran a glowing piece on the App Store Accountability Act, the bill that makes device makers police who downloads what. And it closes by asking readers to pray over the bill’s champion and support its success.
However, like a lot of political debates, this one gets the problem right and the solution completely wrong. The problems the piece describes are real: a search for “#girl” on Instagram surfaced pornography. A Snapchat search, in an app rated for 12-year-olds, turned up more of the same. And the piece doesn’t even mention the worst of it: Meta’s own internal policy permitted its chatbots to hold “romantic or sensual” conversations with children.
Every one of those harms happened inside a social media app, served by the company that built it. But the App Store Accountability Act doesn’t regulate the social media apps doing the harm. It targets somebody else entirely.
The Daily Citizen never mentions money.
The Digital Childhood Alliance runs the state-by-state campaign for this bill, and Melissa McKay, the woman at the center of the profile, was its founding chair. In July 2025, Bloomberg reported, citing three people familiar with the funding, that Meta was helping fund that coalition. When asked, neither the Alliance nor Meta answered directly, though Meta acknowledged it had collaborated with the group.
If Meta is the problem, why does the coalition Meta helps fund keep aiming at everyone else?
The profile ties McKay only to the Digital Childhood Institute. That group sits inside the Alliance’s coalition, and the Alliance’s own website describes a two-entity model (one 501(c)(3), one 501(c)(4)) that it calls “DCA/DCI.”
When Utah passed its version of the bill, Meta and Snap cheered in a joint statement with X, saying the app store is the best place for age checks. That’s the same Snap whose app, rated for 12-year-olds, turned up rotten content in the profile’s own story.
The piece’s central complaint is age ratings.
App Store developers fill out a vague form that gets about ten minutes of human review, it says, and Google Play uses a two-minute form that no human ever reviews. Then it gives away the whole game: developers “have no incentive to rate their systems accurately.”
Developers are the people who make the apps. Instagram’s rating comes from Meta’s answers on that form, and Snapchat’s comes from Snap’s. When a restaurant lies on its health inspection, you fine the restaurant.
You don’t fine DoorDash for delivering the food.
And the rating was never the thing standing between your kid and Instagram. The parental controls already built into every smartphone only take a few minutes to set up, and they let you block any app you want no matter what its rating says (ask me how I know).
The piece also claims 90% of Google Play apps are rated safe for everybody, and it gives no source. Even taking the number at face value, the bill still has developers assigning their own ratings.
Same form, same fox, new henhouse paperwork.
There’s a bigger problem though.
An age rating describes a product that holds still. A movie is the same film every time you watch it. Instagram’s feed is different for every kid, every hour, and an algorithm the device maker can’t see picks what goes in it.
No rating written at download can describe what Meta decides to serve at 11 p.m.
(Meta tried borrowing the movie system anyway. The Motion Picture Association sent it a cease-and-desist letter over “PG-13.”)
“Imagine walking into a G-rated movie that’s full of sex scenes!” the piece says.
“Everyone would sue!”
Yes, they’d sue the studio that shot the film and lied about it.
And the G rating comes from a voluntary system the film industry runs itself. Nobody passed a law making the ticket booth scan your driver’s license. The piece then says deceptive age ratings can be prosecuted under deceptive advertising laws. Those laws already exist.
Point them at the company that wrote the deceptive rating.
Imagine showing your ID card at the city gate, then getting carded at every bar in town anyway.
That’s where this argument ends up.
The piece claims device-level verification is “more private,” since phone makers already hold your information and one check beats handing your data to 50 apps. Your phone knows whose credit card paid for it. But it has no idea who’s holding it.
Proving that a specific adult is the legal parent of a specific child takes identity verification: an ID upload, a database, or a face scan, for every app store account holder in the country.
Two paragraphs later, the same piece says device makers could pass users’ ages along to app developers “when necessary.” So the 50 apps get your kid’s age anyway.
The Meta consent judgment agreed to in August 2026 shows how this plays out. It requires:
- Age assurance for every Facebook and Instagram user in the settling states, new accounts and existing ones (Sections II.A.1 and II.A.6.a.i)
- ID verification or facial age estimation to do it (II.A.3.b)
- Meta to plug into the age signals from device makers
So you get the city gate and the bars.
Australia put its check on the platforms themselves in December, and now adults are handing over face scans and ID documents to prove they aren’t kids. Put the check anywhere and adults end up proving they aren’t children.
The piece says the bill protects kids before they can download a dangerous app.
The bill governs the front door but nothing inside the house or any of the other doors. It doesn’t matter anyway. Because once a download is approved, Instagram’s algorithm runs the same as it did the day before. And a kid who can’t get the app opens a browser or borrows a friend’s phone. It’s like locking the front door and leaving every window (and the slider) open.
The bill also has app stores notify parents when an app changes its features, data collection, rating, or description. But Instagram’s feed changes every time your kid scrolls, and no notice goes out for that.
McKay says, “Our premise is kids have never been able to agree to contracts or sign contracts,” and complains that device makers treat 13- to 17-year-olds “as though they are adults.”
Newsflash, Melissa: so does Instagram, which lets 13-year-olds sign up and click through its terms of service. That’s the contract, and the harm lives in what Instagram does after the click.
A parent’s approval on a download screen works like a field trip permission slip. It records that you said yes, and it does nothing to make the bus safe. What it does do is hand Meta a ready-made line for every lawsuit that follows: “the parent approved it.”
(No wonder Meta has spent millions pushing this)
The article also says that until January, kids were getting emails explaining how to get around parental controls.
Google reversed that policy after public backlash over it.
No bill required.
Finally, the article’s emotional peak:
“If a triple-tested strap on a car seat failed, and a baby died, we would sue the car seat company. We wouldn’t blame the parents.”
Right. We’d sue the car seat company.
We wouldn’t pass a law making Target scan a parent’s face at checkout.
The piece’s second example: “If a product labeled ‘peanut-free’ contained peanuts, and a child went into anaphylaxis, we would sue the company selling the products.”
Let’s map it onto the bill, shall we?
- The label is the age rating
- The company that printed “peanut-free” on the package is Meta, which wrote Instagram’s rating
- The grocery store is the device maker
The piece says to sue the seller, which sounds like it helps the bill. It doesn’t. Because even if you sue the grocery store, the store didn’t write the label, and nobody’s answer to a mislabeled candy bar is making the cashier check every shopper’s ID. That’s what this bill does.
It leaves the label maker alone and puts a checkpoint at the register.
Funny thing, every analogy in the article points at the maker, while the bill points at the shelf. It says parents shouldn’t take the blame for a defective product. Then it backs a bill that turns a parent’s approval into the thing Meta holds up when something goes wrong.
Weird.
“As long as [the app stores] are the wild west, parents will not win,” the piece warns. It also warns against letting your child “be the guinea pig” for tech company profits. But the experiment runs on Meta’s algorithm, and the bill leaves it running.
The best advice in the whole piece is buried near the end: delay kids’ personal technology as long as possible.
That advice doesn’t need a bill.
Parents don’t need a statute to win.
No bill makes you a parent.
You decide whether your 12-year-old gets a smartphone, which apps go on it, and whether it sleeps in their room. None of that authority came from a legislature, and none of it disappears if a bill fails.
Meta spent a record $26.29 million on federal lobbying last year while backing laws that put age checks on the device makers. The article even asked readers to pray for this one’s success.
So it’s fair to ask what Jesus would make of it.
Well, he had some strong words for anyone who causes a child to stumble, and they involved a millstone and the bottom of the sea (Matthew 18:6). And he didn’t soften them for the people who made money off it. He even flipped over the money changers’ tables himself.
So excuse me if I have a hard time picturing him praying over a bill that leaves Meta’s algorithm running on children and moves the paperwork to somebody else. It looks a lot like money changers asking for a blessing.
And he never asked a government to do a parent’s job.
