Police raided the Paris offices of Elon Musk’s social media company X on Tuesday amid a wide-ranging probe into allegations that X has allowed sexually explicit deepfakes on its platform and has abused its algorithms.
The Paris prosecutor’s office sent a cybercrime unit to X’s offices and summoned Musk and former X CEO Linda Yaccarino to appear for a hearing in Paris on April 20, Reuters reported. France’s investigation into X began last year with the European country looking into alleged bias in the social media platform’s algorithms. That investigation has now expanded as prosecutors in Paris are investigating allegations that pornographic deepfakes, including child pornography, and Holocaust denialism have been allowed to spread on X.
Prosecutors are also seeking to interview X managers to gain more information into the platform’s operations, NBC News reported. The European Union’s law enforcement agency Europol also commented on the raid, saying it involved “a range of suspected criminal offenses linked to the functioning and use of the platform, including the dissemination of illegal content and other forms of online criminal activity.”
X’s artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, has been criticized for allowing users to generate sexually explicit images and videos. The chatbot also allows users to upload images to alter or to make into videos. Musk’s platform warns users against “depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner.”
Musk has not commented on the Paris raid directly, but the X owner shared multiple posts from other X users who slammed France over the raid. Musk also shared a House Judiciary GOP report on Tuesday, which found that the European Union began pressuring American social media companies to censor political posts that it opposed as early as 2015. House Judiciary GOP said that in the past ten years, the European Union “successfully pressured social media platforms to censor true information in the United States; Targeted U.S. political content for censorship; and Interfered in elections across Europe.”
The raid on X’s offices in Paris comes as European countries continue to pressure American social media companies to crack down on certain posts. In December, the European Union fined X $140 million under its expansive internet accountability regulations. The European Union accused X of failing to meet advertising transparency requirements in violation of the Digital Services Act, which was put into place to clamp down on what the bloc views as illegal content and misinformation on social media.
Europe’s actions have also drawn criticism from President Trump and his administration. After the European Union fined X, Trump told reporters that “Europe has to be very careful.”
“They’re doing a lot of things. … Europe is going in some bad directions. It’s very bad for the people,” he added.
In December, the State Department announced that it would bar some of the people involved in Europe’s tech censorship effort from entering the United States.
“For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.
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