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Most investors already own companies exposed to accelerating child safety risks online. As AI lowers the cost of creating harmful content, regulators increase scrutiny, and plaintiffs develop new legal theories, child safety is no longer just a social issue. It is becoming a governance, litigation, and reputational issue. Investors have an opportunity to reduce risk and improve outcomes through strategic engagement, or the investor-investee dialogue.
The first article in this series on child safety online outlined the growing scale of the risk from creating, distributing or possessing any visual depiction — including AI-generated content — of explicit conduct involving minors. The article also shared research on the positive impact that engagement can have on both returns and sustainability, noted research that demonstrates that engaging in responsible investing actually reinforces public support for public policy, and highlighted the engagements are more likely to be successful with organizations that previously complied with engagement requests.
This second article in the series focuses on two companies that have demonstrated a willingness to engage with shareholders on sustainability issues and are well positioned to improve child safety online: Apple and Alphabet.
Child safety presents a test of whether sustainability commitments extend beyond environmental performance and traditional governance topics. Alphabet and Apple’s rankings of first and second in the 2026 Brand Finance Sustainability Perceptions Index, which measures the financial value tied to how consumers view a brand’s commitment to sustainability, may make them particularly responsive to investor engagement on child safety.
Apple
Apple continues to invest in improving the safety of its platforms for children, including through its feature Communication Safety, which blocks images or videos containing nudity that a child might attempt to receive or send, and offers resources and options for them to get help, including reporting directly to Apple. At the same time, the legal, regulatory, reputational, and financial risk from explicit content involving minors grows.
While Apple prevailed in two private class action lawsuits in 2025 (Amy et al v. Apple in October 2025 and Doe v. Apple Inc. in May 2025), the February 2026 lawsuit brought by the West Virginia Attorney General may prove more consequential. Rather than treating Apple as the publisher of third-party child sexual abuse material (CSAM), the complaint focuses on Apple’s own decisions, including its abandonment of NeuralHash after developing the technology to detect CSAM, its emphasis on safety and privacy in marketing, and its substantially lower CyberTipline reporting relative to peers. The complaint notes that Google filed 1.47 million CyberTipline reports in 2023 compared to Apple’s alleged 267. The UK’s NSPCC similarly reported that Apple was implicated in more CSAM cases in England and Wales between April 2022 and March 2023 than Apple reported globally in a year. The principal risk may not be financial damages, which Apple could absorb, but rather a court order or settlement that requires changes to Apple’s engineering architecture, privacy positioning, or operating practices. The lawsuit also creates a multistate enforcement template.
Questions Investors Should Ask Apple
- What child safety metrics are regularly reviewed by the board?
- How are safety tradeoffs incorporated into product design decisions and executive accountability?
- How does management evaluate whether its privacy architecture appropriately balances user privacy and child protection?
- What additional age-estimation and App Store review capabilities are under consideration?
- How does Apple assess the effectiveness of child-safety interventions?
Alphabet
Alphabet is currently a defendant in substantial pending child safety online litigation related to addictive product design and youth mental health harms, not the allegations of under detection of CSAM by design that Apple faces. With respect to CSAM, Alphabet’s central vulnerability is whether its extensive detection, reporting, and enforcement are adequate across a much broader—and more behaviorally complex—ecosystem. While Apple’s alleged role is characterized as hosting, storing, or transmitting material after abuse has occurred, Alphabet can be implicated in more stages of the harm chain: (i) Search or YouTube may help offenders locate material, victims, or communities; (ii) YouTube systems may connect users with progressively more exploitative content; (iii) Gmail or comments may enable communication off-platform; (iv) Drive and Photos can hold imagery; (iv) Gemini and other generative tools introduce the risk of synthetic or manipulated CSAM; and (v) YouTube advertising or creator economics may lead to exploitative content generating revenue. Alphabet’s higher reporting numbers can serve as a defense, but reporting millions of items is not the same as reducing harm: the timeliness of the reports, whether they include usable identity and location information for law enforcement, whether re-upload was prevented, and whether children in immediate danger were prioritized are all important.
Questions Investors Should Ask Alphabet
- What child safety metrics are reviewed by the board?
- How quickly is known harmful content detected and removed?
- How is re-upload prevented?
- What safeguards exist for generative AI products?
Questions Investors Should Ask Apple and Alphabet
Investors may wish to understand whether Apple and Alphabet have evaluated additional age-estimation capabilities and whether App Store reviews are being systematically monitored for indicators of CSAM, exploitation, or attempts to connect minors with adults.
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Our Most Valuable Resource and The Best Hope for the Future
Late US President John F Kennedy said, “Children are the world’s most valuable resource and its best hope for the future.” From a moral perspective, working with the largest companies to keep them safe is the right thing to do. From a fiduciary perspective, the growing mental health and safety crisis affecting children and youth increasingly creates litigation, regulatory, reputational, and business-model risks for companies and, therefore, for long-term investment portfolios.
Institutional and retail investors can incorporate online child safety into stewardship priorities and proxy voting frameworks and engage directly or collaboratively with Apple and Alphabet on the questions in this article.
The safety of the world’s most valuable resource and its best hope for the future deserves at least the same level of attention as climate, governance, cybersecurity, and human capital management.
This Series
The first article in this series on child safety online explained why child safety online is becoming a material stewardship issue. This article identifies two consumer-facing companies that investors can engage with today: Apple and Alphabet. Future articles will examine additional companies and escalation pathways available to shareholders.
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