April 20, 2026

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Reverend Derrick Green, Interfaith Action Movement
interfaithactionmovementiam@gmail.com

NEW POLL: New Jersey Parents Demand a Say in Their Teens’ Online Lives
Nearly 9-in-10 Parents Support Principles of the App Store Accountability Act
Respondents Reject Solutions That Don’t Verify Age or Put Parents in Control

NEWARK, NJ – Today, Interfaith Action Movement (IAM), a coalition of faith leaders of congregations serving the spiritual, social, and economic needs of underserved and marginalized communities in New Jersey and across the nation, released a poll of 800 New Jersey registered voters—including 269 parents of children under 18—revealing overwhelming support for requiring app stores to verify users’ ages and obtain parental approval before minors can download apps.

The results send an unmistakable message to Congress: parents want real protections for their children online—not half-measures that let kids misrepresent their age and circumvent age-appropriate protections.

A number of bills are under consideration, including the App Store Accountability Act, which won approval in the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce on March 5th of this year. Also, last week, New Jersey’s U.S. Representative Josh Gottheimer (NJ-05) introduced the Parents Decide Act, which includes key elements to making the internet safer, like age verification at device setup and parental approval on app downloads.

IAM founder Reverend Derrick Green said the results confirm what he hears from families every week in congregations across New Jersey.

“I talk to parents in Paterson, in Newark, in Camden, and they all tell me the same thing: I don’t know what my child is downloading and I don’t know how to stop it. These are good parents. These are parents working two, three jobs trying to hold their families together. And the tech companies have set up a system where a 12-year-old can hit a button, and access whatever they want—and the parent never even knows. That is not acceptable.

“This poll says what we already know. Nearly nine out of ten parents are saying the same thing: let me be involved. Let me have a say before my child downloads an app. That’s what the App Store Accountability Act does. It’s simple. When your child tries to download an app, you get notified and you approve it. That’s a family sitting down together and making a decision together. That’s the formula. God, family, conversation.

“Now, there are other bills in Congress that sound good but don’t do the work. The Parents Over Platforms Act just asks kids to type in their age. No verification. No parent involved. And it’s up to tech companies to say if their app needs additional forms of protection for teens to use them. Our kids are simply not protected with a system like this. They deserve a safer internet that still allows teens to access the benefits of the internet.”

The poll bears out Reverend Green’s assessment. 86% of New Jersey voters, and 87% of parents, support requiring app stores to verify users’ ages and obtain parental approval before minors can download apps, the core principles of the App Store Accountability Act. Asked specifically about parental approval, support rises to 91% overall, cutting across every partisan group: 93% of Republicans, 91% of Independents, and 90% of Democrats. By a 3-to-1 margin, voters want these protections to apply to all apps—not just social media—and 89% say parents should have to approve before a child can agree to an app’s terms of service.

Notably, 80% of voters say giving parents approval over their children’s app downloads will help protect children without compromising their privacy. This firmly rejects the argument that parental consent means handing more personal data to tech companies.

The results are equally clear about what voters do not want. When presented with legislation that merely asks users to self-report their age but does not require verification or parental approval—the approach taken by the Parents Over Platforms Act—65% of voters oppose it. In a head-to-head comparison, voters chose the ASAA model over the POPA model by a 5-to-1 margin (84% to 16%) as the more effective way to safeguard children online. The contrast could not be sharper: 86% support when you verify age and require parental approval; just 35% when you don’t.

The accompanying polling memo details additional findings, including voter skepticism of self-reported age verification, concerns about technical deficiencies in POPA that weaken that bill’s approach to youth safety, preferences for centralized app store verification over an app-by-app approach, and the strong electoral upside for members of Congress who support this legislation.

Reverend Derrick Green is the founder of Interfaith Action Movement (I AM) and previously served as the New Jersey Governor’s Senior Advisor for Diversity, Faith, Urban and Regional Growth.

Methodology: This poll was conducted by Global Strategy Group from March 26 to April 1, 2026, among 800 registered voters in New Jersey, including an oversample of 269 parents of children under 18. The margin of error is +/- 3.5% for the full sample and +/- 6.0% for parents. The survey was conducted online.
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