As part of a judicial investigation, the Paris public prosecutor’s office has raided the French headquarters of X. Elon Musk has also been summoned.
The Paris public prosecutor’s office conducted a search of the X office in the French capital this morning. Ironically, the public prosecutor’s office announced this via a post on the social media platform. The French national cybersecurity agency and Europol were also present.
The search is part of a judicial investigation against X that has been ongoing for a year. X is accused of deliberately influencing its algorithms to favor certain politically tinted posts, without users being aware of this. That is a crime under French law, and so X was officially charged last summer.
The investigators want to question Elon Musk and X CEO Linda Yaccarino and ask them to voluntarily report to Paris. It seems unlikely that Musk will accept that invitation. X previously responded that it considers the investigation a ‘flagrant undermining’ of its fundamental rights and denies any form of conscious manipulation by ‘foreign interference’.
DSA infringements
Nevertheless, Musk and X are in very turbulent waters in Europe. The European Union also wants to summon the social media platform. House chatbot Grok is being widely abused to spread artificially generated nude images of women and minors, and X is being blamed for failing to act against it. European Commissioner Henna Virkunnen spoke out sharply on the matter.
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As if that weren’t enough grist for the legal mill, the Commission had already identified several infringements of the DSA legislation at the end of last year. These resulted in a fine of 120 million euros. The Grok controversy will very likely add an extra fine to that, but X could also get into criminal trouble in France.