Issa Bee is a 13-year-old girl from rural New Mexico. When her Facebook account was created, in August 2023, she listed a 2002 birthday to avoid the restrictions attached to a child’s account. But anybody could tell Issa was a young girl. She posted about the cafeteria and school bus, about loving Harry Styles, about sports tryouts and finishing seventh grade and losing her last baby tooth. Even Facebook’s algorithm seemed to recognize her age; most of the Reels it served her were from other teenage girls.
Within a few days of signing up for Facebook, Issa amassed 5,000 friends and more than 6,700 followers. Nearly all were adult men, including many who followed her from abroad—Nigeria, Ghana, the Dominican Republic. These men reacted to Issa’s posts with comments like “absolutely gorgeous baby girl,” or emojis with heart eyes. In Issa’s Facebook Messenger inbox, men asked to connect with her on other platforms. Some asked her to meet in person. “My interest has been piqued,” one adult user wrote. “I’m looking for a sugar baby to spoil.”
Issa’s photo was shared on Facebook by a user who frequently shares photos of young girls in suggestive poses. By this point, Issa was receiving an average of three or four unsolicited photos of exposed penises in her Messenger inbox per week. Even after she reported those incidents to Facebook, the accounts that sent the images remained active (or were taken offline only briefly) and continued to post photos of genitalia, according to a legal complaint filed by the state of New Mexico. The Reels that Facebook served Issa included graphic sexual images of young girls, according to state officials, followed by advertisements for a law firm representing trafficking survivors. Given her account’s popularity, Facebook prompted Issa to set up a professional account to “let your fans support you by sending stars and gifts.” If her audience grew further, according to her “professional dashboard” on Facebook, Issa would be able to “unlock more ways to make money.”
There’s one more thing to know about Issa Bee: she isn’t real. She’s an invention of the New Mexico Department of Justice, a so-called “sock puppet” account created in 2023 as part of an ongoing investigation into alleged child sexual abuse on Facebook and Instagram, which are both owned by Meta. As a result of that investigation, New Mexico Attorney General Raùl Torrez is suing Meta, alleging that it “has allowed Facebook and Instagram to become a marketplace for predators in search of children upon whom to prey.”
Torrez, a 49-year old career prosecutor with a youthful face beneath a salt-and-pepper beard, is an unlikely antagonist for Big Tech. His sparsely furnished office in New Mexico is far from the campuses of Silicon Valley or the lawmakers and regulators in Washington. Aside from a brief stint at a startup in his 20s, he has no connection to the tech industry. But he is waging a fierce crusade against the harms he says social-media companies are inflicting on minors. His office’s investigation into Meta, he says, reveals how tech giants neglected customer safety. “Warnings were disregarded, over and over and over again,” he tells me during a recent interview in his Albuquerque office. “It's a series of decisions that demonstrate a pattern of conduct that favors profit over safety.”
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New Mexico’s suit argues Meta “knowingly exposes children to the twin dangers of sexual exploitation and mental health harm,” violating the state’s Unfair Practices Act and creating a public nuisance. The suit alleges that Meta’s recommendation algorithm has created a “marketplace” to “connect pedophiles, predators, and others engaged in the commerce of sex,” allowing them “to hunt for, groom, sell, and buy sex with children and sexual images of children at an unprecedented scale.” The case is slated for trial in February, when it would be one of the first major cases against social-media companies to be heard by a jury.
Meta disputes New Mexico’s claims. “We want teens to have safe, age-appropriate experiences online, and have built a range of tools to support them and their parents,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to TIME. “Last year, we launched Teen Accounts, which fundamentally reimagined the teen experience on Instagram, placing them in automatic protections to limit who could contact them, the content they see, and how much time they spend on the app. We’ve spent a decade working on these issues and hiring people who have dedicated their careers to keeping young people safe and supported online. The complaint mischaracterizes our work using selective quotes and cherry-picked documents."
The case against Meta isn’t Torrez’s only challenge to Big Tech. Last year he sued Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, alleging the platform is “a breeding ground for predators to collect sexually explicit images of children.” According to New Mexico’s complaint in that matter, “Snap’s design–especially its focus on ephemeral content–is uniquely suited to facilitate illegal and illicit conduct and conversations. Snap’s algorithm serves up children to adult predators, and Snap Map lets them find them in the real world. Snap knows all of this.”
A judge denied Snap’s motion to dismiss the case in April, and the case is currently in the discovery phase. “We are committed to creating a safe and enjoyable environment for our community, and we have incorporated privacy and safety features into our platform from the very beginning,” a Snap spokesperson said in a statement to TIME. “Unfortunately, the reality is this—there is no single safety feature or policy that can eliminate every potential threat online or in the world around us. This is why we continually adapt our strategies to fight against bad actors, and we remain committed to collaborating with law enforcement. However, rather than collaborating with Snap alongside law enforcement in New Mexico, the New Mexico Attorney General chose to pursue litigation based on clear misrepresentations.”