Prosecutors have raided the French headquarters of Elon Musk’s social media platform X and summoned the tech billionaire and the company’s former chief executive for questioning as part of an investigation into alleged cybercrime.
“A search is under way by the cybercrime unit of the Paris prosecutor’s office, the national police cyber unit and Europol,” the Paris prosecutors’ office said in a post on X on Tuesday, adding that it would no longer be publishing on the network.
It said in a statement that Musk and Linda Yaccarino had been summoned for “voluntary questioning” in April in their capacity as “de facto and de jure managers of the X platform at the time of the events”. Yaccarino resigned as chief executive of X in July last year.
The French prosecutors’ announcement comes amid a hardening of European attitudes to social media firms. A senior source in the Greek government told Reuters on Tuesday the country was “very close” to announcing a social media ban for children under 15.
In Spain, where the government is preparing a series of measures including a social media ban for under-16s, the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, promised to protect children from the “digital wild west” and hold tech companies responsible for hateful and harmful content.
Sánchez said on Tuesday that urgent action was needed because social media was a “failed state where laws are ignored and crimes are tolerated”.
He also took Musk to task for using X to “amplify disinformation” over his administration’s decision last week to regularise 500,000 undocumented workers and asylum seekers, pointing out that Musk was himself a migrant.
The comments appeared to infuriate Musk, who used a post on X later on Tuesday to call Sánchez “a traitor to the people of Spain”.
The Paris raid is part of an investigation launched in January last year into the suspected abuse of algorithms and fraudulent data extraction, which the prosecutor’s office said it had widened to cover complaints about X’s artificial intelligence tool, Grok.
It said the alleged offences it was investigating now included complicity in the possession and organised distribution of child abuse images, violation of image rights through sexualised deepfakes, and denial of crimes against humanity.
Other possible charges included fraudulent data extraction from, and falsified operation of, an automated data processing system by an organised group, and operation of an illegal online platform by an organised group, the statement said.
French authorities launched the investigation after the centre-right MP Éric Bothorel filed a complaint alleging that biased algorithms on the platform were likely to have distorted its data processing system and affected the kind of content it recommended.
Bothorel complained of a “reduced diversity of voices” and Musk’s “personal interventions” in X’s management since he bought it in 2022. Another complaint said the changes had led to a surge in “nauseating political content”.
Prosecutors said in November that they were expanding the investigation to include the behaviour of Grok, which allegedly engaged in Holocaust denial, advancing false claims commonly made by people who deny Nazi Germany murdered 6 million Jews.
The chatbot has since caused outrage by allowing users to “strip” clothed people, including children, in photos through AI image generation and editing. The EU has launched an investigation into its production and dissemination of sexualised deepfakes of women and minors.
X said in a statement: “We are disappointed by this development, but we are not surprised. The Paris Public Prosecutor’s office widely publicized the raid—making clear that today’s action was an abusive act of law enforcement theater designed to achieve illegitimate political objectives.
“The Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office is plainly attempting to exert pressure on X’s senior management in the United States by targeting our French entity and employees, who are not the focus of this investigation.
“The allegations underlying today’s raid are baseless and X categorically denies any wrongdoing. Today’s staged raid reinforces our conviction that this investigation distorts French law, circumvents due process, and endangers free speech.”
The Paris prosecutor’s office said on Tuesday that the investigation was being conducted as “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”.
Despite being described as voluntary, the summonses issued to Musk and Yaccarino are mandatory, but they are hard to enforce on people outside France. Afterwards, authorities can potentially place suspects in custody.
Europol said it supported the investigation through its European cybercrime centre and deployed a specialist to Paris for the raid. “The investigation concerns a range of suspected criminal offences linked to the functioning and use of the platform,” it said.
Those included “the dissemination of illegal content and other forms of online criminal activity”, the pan-European policing organisation said, adding that it “stands ready to continue supporting the French authorities as the investigation progresses”.
