Inti Landauro and Sudip Kar-Gupta
Paris: French police raided the offices of Elon Musk’s social media network X on Tuesday and prosecutors ordered the tech billionaire to face questions in April in a widening investigation, amid growing scrutiny of the platform by authorities across Europe.
France’s raid and the summoning of Musk – which could further increase tensions between Europe and the US over big tech and free speech – are linked to a year-long investigation into suspected abuse of algorithms and fraudulent data extraction by X or its executives.
Britain’s privacy watchdog, meanwhile, also kicked off a formal investigation into Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok over the processing of personal data and its potential to produce harmful sexualised images and video content.
In a statement, the Paris prosecutor’s office said it had broadened the scope of its investigation following complaints over the functioning of Grok.
The French probe will now also investigate alleged complicity in the “detention and diffusion” of images of a child-pornographic nature and the violation of a person’s image rights with sexually explicit deepfakes, among other potential crimes.
Musk and former CEO Linda Yaccarino were summoned to a hearing on April 20. Other X staff were also summoned as witnesses.
There was no immediate comment from X. In July, Musk denied the initial accusations and said French prosecutors were launching a “politically-motivated criminal investigation”.
“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.
Such summons are mandatory, though they are harder to enforce on people who do not live in France.
After such a hearing, authorities can decide to either shelve or continue the probe, and potentially put suspects in custody.
Widening probes into X
Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office, meanwhile, said it was investigating the xAI chatbot, following reports that Grok had been used to generate non-consensual sexual imagery of individuals, including children.
Britain’s media regulator Ofcom said separately it was setting out the next steps in its investigation into X launched last month, though provided few details.
Ofcom is seeking to assess if the company has done enough to mitigate the risk of sexual deepfakes spreading on its social media platform. But it has said it was not investigating xAI, which operates the Grok chatbot, as it falls beyond the scope of current law.
Last week the European Union launched an investigation into X too, seeking to assess whether it disseminated illegal content, following public outcry over the spreading of manipulated
sexualised images by Grok.
The chatbot continues to generate sexualised images of people even when users explicitly warn that the subjects do not consent, Reuters has found.
xAI put some restrictions on Grok’s image generation function in response to the backlash last month.
The Paris prosecutor’s cybercrime unit is conducting the investigation in France, together with the French police’s own cybercrime unit and Europol. The unit previously arrested Telegram founder Pavel Durov in 2024 over charges including complicity in organised crime carried out on the messaging app, charges his lawyer has described as “absurd”.
The prosecutor’s office said it launched the investigation after being contacted by a lawmaker alleging that biased algorithms in X were likely to have distorted the operation of an automated data processing system.
“Glad to see that my complaint from January 2025 is yielding results!” that lawmaker, Eric Bothorel, said on X. “In Europe, and particularly in France, the Rule of Law means that no one is above the law.”
The prosecutor’s office also said it was leaving the X social media platform and would communicate on LinkedIn and Instagram from now on. LinkedIn belongs to Microsoft and Instagram to Meta.
Reuters
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