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

BarcelonaThe cybercrime unit of the Paris Prosecutor's Office raided the French headquarters of the social network X – 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 algorithms. The Paris Prosecutor's Office – Parquete de Paris in French – announced this in a post on the social network itself, owned by Elon Musk. The agency also stated that it is leaving X and will communicate through the LinkedIn and Instagram platforms, which belong to Microsoft and Meta, respectively.

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

A deputy's complaint

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.