Paris prosecutors have raided the offices of Elon Musk’s social media platform X as part of a cyber-crime investigation, it said on Tuesday.
The tech billionaire has also been summoned by prosecutors to appear in April, following a year-long investigation into into suspected abuse of algorithms by X or its executives.
Prosecutors said on Tuesday they have widened the investigation following complaints over the site’s AI chatbot, Grok.
Investigators will look into creation of images of a child pornographic nature and the violation of a person’s image rights with sexually explicit deepfakes, along with other potential crimes.
“At this stage, the conduct of this investigation is 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,” the prosecutor’s office said.
It added that the police’s National Cyber Unit along with Europol were involved in the investigation.
The prosecutors office said it would be leaving X after making the announcement, and that it would only be communicating on LinkedIn and Instagram from now on.
The Independent has reached out to X for comment. Denying the accusations in July, the company said French prosecutors were launching a “politically-motivated criminal investigation”.
In its rebuttal from July, X claimed the investigation “egregiously undermines X’s fundamental right to due process and threatens our users’ rights to privacy and free speech”.
It claimed there were “serious concerns about the impartiality, fairness, and political motivations of the investigation” because of the involvement of several experts who have been critical of the social media site, formerly known as Twitter.
“X believes that this investigation is distorting French law in order to serve a political agenda and, ultimately, restrict free speech,” it added. “For these reasons, X has not acceded to the French authorities’ demands, as we have a legal right to do.”
