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.”
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.
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