French police have raided the Paris offices of X and summoned its owner, Elon Musk, to appear at a hearing, amid an ongoing investigation into the social media giant, the prosecution has said.
The search on Tuesday related to an investigation launched in January last year into allegations of biased algorithms and fraudulent data extraction by the platform, the Paris Prosecutor’s Office said in a post on X.
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The investigation has since widened, following complaints about X’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Grok, to include the platform’s alleged “complicity” in numerous potential crimes, the office said.
These included possessing and spreading pornographic images of minors, defamation of personal image related to the creation of sexually explicit “deepfakes”, Holocaust denial, and manipulation of an automated data processing system.
Prosecutors have also filed requests for “voluntary interviews” of Musk – the billionaire CEO of X’s parent company xAI, as well as SpaceX and Tesla – and the platform’s former CEO, Linda Yaccarino, on April 20.
Other staff at X – known as Twitter before Musk’s 2022 purchase of the platform – have been summoned to appear the same week as witnesses, the office said.
“At this stage, the conduct of this investigation is part of a constructive approach, with the aim of ultimately ensuring that the X platform complies with French laws, insofar as it operates on national territory,” the prosecutor’s office said.
The prosecutor’s cybercrime division was conducting the inquiry in addition to the French police’s cybercrime unit and the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation, or Europol, the office said.
In its post on X, the Paris Prosecutor’s Office said it was “leaving” the platform, advising people to find its updates on LinkedIn and Instagram instead.
‘Political censorship’
X has not yet publicly responded to the raid or summons.
But in July, it “categorically” denied the allegations of algorithm manipulation and fraudulent data extraction.
“X is committed to defending its fundamental rights, protecting user data and resisting political censorship,” a statement from X’s global government affairs office said at the time.
France and the EU have stepped up efforts to rein in large social media operators in recent years, claiming that giant platforms such as X, Meta and TikTok have failed to tackle illegal content, disinformation and hate speech satisfactorily.
French authorities have been among the most vocal advocates of tougher oversight.
Last week, the European Commission launched an investigation into Grok relating to the creation of sexually explicit fake images of women and minors.
The commission said the inquiry would look at whether the AI tool complied with its legal obligations under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires social media companies to address illegal and harmful online content.
In December, the EU ordered X to pay a fine of 120 million euros ($141m) for violating the DSA’s transparency obligations.
The United Kingdom’s media regulator, Ofcom, also launched a formal investigation into X last month over the use of Grok to generate sexualised deepfakes.
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