French police have raided X’s offices in Paris and summoned its chairman, Elon Musk, to testify, in an escalation of a multifaceted investigation into the social media platform’s data use, deepfake porn generation, and other allegations of wrongdoing.
Cybercrime investigators in France have been probing the company for over a year, with authorities looking into the company for allegations of abuse of algorithms under Musk and fraudulent data extraction.
The investigation has expanded in recent months, Paris’s chief prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement on Tuesday. Recently, the investigation has expanded to include allegations of the possession of child sexual abuse material, after X’s AI bot, Grok, generated an estimated 3 million sexualized images over the course of 11 days last month, including 23,000 that appeared to depict children.
French prosecutors have said that X is allowing users to be targeted for ads based on highly sensitive personal information, in violation of privacy concerns.
Also under investigation by French authorities is Grok’s alleged spreading of Holocaust denial, which is illegal under French laws.
Prosecutors have summoned Musk and former chief executive Linda Yaccarino to appear at hearings this spring in relation to the probe.
X’s Global Government Affairs department said in a statement that the allegations are “baseless” and said the investigation violates “X’s rights to defend itself.” Musk said it was a “political attack,” without evidence.
The U.K. also launched an investigation into the company on Tuesday, shortly after the Paris raid. The U.K. government is investigating whether X and xAI, which operates Grok, broke the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, known as GDPR, in creating the sexualized deepfakes.
The investigations are the latest developments in fights between X and other Big Tech companies against Europe’s digital rights regulations.
“The reports about Grok raise deeply troubling questions about how people’s personal data has been used to generate intimate or sexualised images without their knowledge or consent, and whether the necessary safeguards were put in place to prevent this,” said William Malcolm, an official with the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office. “Losing control of personal data in this way can cause immediate and significant harm. This is particularly the case where children are involved.”
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