Paris prosecutors raid French offices of Elon Musk's X

French cybercrime authorities were on Tuesday, February 3, carrying out a search of the French offices of social media network X, the Paris public prosecutor's office said. The operation, which involves EU police agency Europol, is part of an investigation opened in January 2025 into whether X's algorithm had been used to interfere in French politics.

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https://www.lemonde.fr/en/police-and-justice/article/2026/02/03/paris-prosecutors-raid-french-offices-of-elon-musk-s-x_6750083_105.html

French prosecutors also said they had summoned X owner Elon Musk for a voluntary interview in April as part of the investigation. "Summons for voluntary interviews on April 20, 2026, in Paris have been sent to Mr. Elon Musk and Ms. Linda Yaccarino, in their capacity as de facto and de jure managers of the X platform at the time of the events," it said. Yaccarino resigned as CEO of X in July last year, after two years at the company's helm.

The investigation was opened following two complaints in January 2025 and then broadened after additional reports criticized the AI chatbot Grok for its role in disseminating Holocaust denials and sexual deepfakes, the prosecutor's office said in a statement. One of the complaints came from Eric Bothorel, an MP from President Emmanuel Macron's Renaissance party, who complained of "reduced diversity of voices and options" and Musk's "personal interventions" in the platform's management since he took it over.

The Paris public prosecutor's office at the time confirmed the investigation, denouncing the alleged biased algorithms which may have "distorted the operation of an automated data processing system." Laurent Buanec, France director of X, pushed back against the investigation in January 2025, saying X had "strict, clear and public rules," which protected the platform from hate speech and disinformation.