By Euronews
Published on •Updated
French prosecutors searched the offices of Elon Musk’s social media platform X on Tuesday as part of a preliminary investigation into a range of alleged offences, including spreading child sexual abuse images and deepfakes.
The prosecutor’s cybercrime unit conducted the searches with the support of Europol and the French police’s own cybercrime department, it said in a post on X.
The investigation was opened in January last year by cybercrime unit.
The probe is looking into alleged “complicity” in possession and spreading of pornographic images of minors, sexually explicit deepfakes, denial of crimes against humanity and manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group, among other charges.
The prosecutor’s office said Musk and former X chief executive officer Linda Yaccarino had been summoned to appear at hearings on 20 April as part of the investigation.
The probe was launched after liberal lawmaker Eric Bothorel from the Renaissance party alleged that biased algorithms on X were likely to have distorted the functioning of an automated data processing system.
A separate complaint was raised by a cybersecurity director within the civil service, who said changes to X’s algorithm had amplified “nasty political content,” Le Monde reported.
The prosecutor’s office previously said that the two people alleged the suspected use of X’s algorithm for the “purposes of foreign interference”.
“The investigation was expanded following other reports denouncing the operation of Grok on the X platform, which led to the dissemination of Holocaust denial content and sexual deepfakes,” it said in a statement on Tuesday.
In November, Paris prosecutors said that they would investigate artificial intelligence chatbot Grok — built by Musk’s company xAI and integrated into X — after it generated French-language posts that questioned the use of gas chambers at Auschwitz.
More recently, Grok has sparked a global backlash by allowing users to create nonconsensual sexually explicit material of women and children.
The prosecutor’s office also said on Tuesday that it was leaving X and told users to “find us on LinkedIn and Instagram”.