West Virginia Sues Apple Over Alleged Spread Of Child Abuse Imagery

West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey accused Apple in a lawsuit Thursday of allowing its iCloud platform to be used to store and distribute child sexual abuse material.

It’s the latest claim against Apple that alleges the company knowingly failed to stop the spread of sexual content featuring children — and according to McCuskey, the first to be brought by a governmental agency (last year, a federal judge threw out a similar class action case against the company). And it comes as the tech industry faces mounting global pressure to address how its platforms harm children.

In a statement, McCuskey said Apple knew the spread of illicit content on its platform was a problem but took “no meaningful action to stop it.” He said he filed the lawsuit “to demand Apple follow the law, report these images, and stop re-victimizing children by allowing these images to be stored and shared.”

In addition to damages, the lawsuit filed in the Circuit Court of Mason County seeks to force Apple to implement new measures to detect child abuse materials and make its products safer in the future.

In a statement, Apple spokesperson Olivia Dalton said “protecting the safety and privacy of our users, especially children, is central to what we do.” She highlighted Apple’s automated systems that intervene when nudity is detected on kids’ devices and said the company is constantly innovating to combat threats to children.

In a press release and documents accompanying the filing, McCuskey highlighted text messages where Apple executive Eric Friedman called iCloud the “greatest platform for distributing child porn.” The 2020 text exchange has been previously reported and has appeared in other lawsuits against the company.

The lawsuit also notes a discrepancy between the number of child abuse material reports made by Apple and reports made by Google and Meta. In 2023, Apple made 267 reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, compared with roughly 1.47 million reports from Google and 30.6 million from Meta. Unlike Apple, both Google and Meta administer major social platforms.

The West Virginia lawsuit comes as policymakers across the country zero in on Big Tech’s alleged risks to kids. Lawmakers in Washington and several states are seeking to address threats posed to children by artificial intelligence and social media, and high-profile lawsuits focused on child welfare are percolating in places like California and New Mexico.