French authorities search the Paris headquarters of the social network X and summon Elon Musk for questioning.

Paris/BarcelonaThe French judicial investigation into the social network X, owned by American magnate Elon Musk, is progressing a year after it began. The cybercrime unit of the Paris Prosecutor's Office searched the platform's French headquarters—formerly Twitter—on Tuesday, along with the French Gendarmerie's national cybersecurity unit and Europol, as part of an investigation opened in January 2025 into the alleged bias of some of its algorithms. Months later, the investigation expanded to include alleged crimes related to the artificial intelligence program used by X, Grok. The program is accused of facilitating the dissemination of AI-generated videos of a sexual nature—so-called deepfakes- using images of real people - mostly women - without consent, including images of minors. French authorities are also investigating Grok for the alleged dissemination of Holocaust denial ideas.

Another accusation concerns the tool used to combat the distribution of child pornography on its platform. Last year, X changed the program that notifies users of prohibited child pornography content; apparently, the new tool is much less effective. Between June and October 2025, notifications sent by X to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children regarding child pornography fell by more than 81%.

According to prosecution sources, the charges against X include complicity in the possession of child pornography images, complicity in the distribution, offering, or making available of child pornography, denial of crimes against humanity, fraudulent extraction of data, and operation of an illegal platform. The Paris Public Prosecutor's Office announced the police operation this Tuesday in a post on the same social network owned by Elon Musk. Interestingly, in the same message, the prosecutor's office also stated that it is abandoning X and will now communicate through the LinkedIn and Instagram platforms, which belong to Microsoft and Meta, respectively.

Musk quote

The prosecutor's office has summoned Elon Musk and the company's former CEO, Linda Yaccarino, to testify on April 20. It has also summoned several X employees for questioning "as witnesses." It is uncertain whether Musk will appear, but it is unlikely. So far, the X owner has been very uncooperative with the French justice system.

When the prosecutor's office opened the investigation last year, Musk denounced a "political" operation and refused to grant access to the platform's algorithm as requested by French authorities. "X believes this investigation distorts French law to serve a political agenda and ultimately restrict freedom of expression," he stated in July.

A complaint from a member of parliament

The investigation was opened following a request from French MP Éric Bothorel (Renaissance), who alleged that the platform's algorithms were biased and that this would likely have distorted the normal functioning of an automated data processing system. Bothorel immediately welcomed the operation, also through a post on X, in which he said he was pleased that his complaint from January 2025 had been effective. "In Europe, and particularly in France, the rule of law means that 'no one is above the law' and that European regulations, transposed into French law, apply to everyone," he added.

Bothorel himself explained a year ago via X that he had seen several posts on the social network accusing the authors of the biased operation of the recommendation algorithm in the automated data processing system. "I informed the J3 cybercrime unit – the cybercrime unit of the Paris Prosecutor's Office – of this by means of a letter on January 12," Bothorel said in a tweet on February 6 of last year.