Lawsuit Against Apple To Remain In State Court

A lawsuit brought by the state of West Virginia against Apple alleging the company’s business practices safeguard child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) will remain in state courts.  

State Attorney General JB McCuskey sued Apple in February, alleging that Apple’s reporting to the CyberTipline – the nation’s centralized reporting system for online child sexual exploitation – lagged dramatically behind other major technology companies. In 2023, Apple made just 267 such reports.  

By contrast, Google filed nearly a million and a half reports and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, filed more than 30 million.  

Apple attempted to move the case into federal court saying that its mandatory reporting to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children “made it a person ‘acting under’ a federal officer.” 

The federal court rejected that argument and remanded the case to state court, concluding that Apple’s compliance with federal reporting requirements did not provide a basis for federal officer jurisdiction.  

“The ruling ensures that this case will be decided where it belongs—in a West Virginia court applying West Virginia law,” McCuskey said. “At its core, this case is about Apple’s deliberate business and product-design decisions to prioritize profits over the safety of our children. Apple’s failure to deploy available detection technology is not a passive oversight — it is a choice. That is why we stepped up to take on this fight, and we will continue to do everything in our power to hold them accountable.”   

The lawsuit reveals that Apple, in its own internal communications, described itself as the “greatest platform for distributing child porn” — yet took no meaningful action to stop it. Rather than follow through on its public commitment to deploy child sexual abuse material detection technology, the complaint alleges that Apple abandoned those efforts and continued making product design decisions that facilitated the storage and distribution of child sexual abuse material while publicly portraying itself as a leader in child safety. 
 
Apple has filed notice to appeal the remand order.