French police have raided the Paris offices of X and summoned its owner, Elon Musk, to appear at a hearing, amid an ongoing investigation into the social media giant, the prosecution has said.
The search on Tuesday related to an investigation launched in January last year into allegations of biased algorithms and fraudulent data extraction by the platform, the Paris Prosecutor’s Office said in a post on X.
The investigation has since widened, following complaints about X’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Grok, to include the platform’s alleged “complicity” in numerous potential crimes, the office said.
These included possessing and spreading pornographic images of minors, defamation of personal image related to the creation of sexually explicit “deepfakes”, Holocaust denial, and manipulation of an automated data processing system.
Prosecutors have also filed requests for “voluntary interviews” of Musk – the billionaire CEO of X’s parent company xAI, as well as SpaceX and Tesla – and the platform’s former CEO, Linda Yaccarino, on April 20.
Other staff at X – known as Twitter before Musk’s 2022 purchase of the platform – have been summoned to appear the same week as witnesses, the office said.
The prosecutor’s cybercrime division was conducting the inquiry in addition to the French police’s cybercrime unit and the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation, or Europol, the office said.
In its post on X, the Paris Prosecutor’s Office said it was “leaving” the platform, advising people to find its updates on LinkedIn and Instagram instead.
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