Paris prosecutors raid X offices in child abuse, deepfake probe

AP

Paris

French prosecutors searched the offices of Elon Musk’s social media platform X on Tuesday as part of a preliminary investigation into a range of alleged offences, including spreading child sexual abuse images and deepfakes.

The investigation was opened in January last year by the prosecutors’ cybercrime unit, the Paris prosecutors’ office said in a statement. It is looking into alleged “complicity” in possession and spreading of pornographic images of minors, sexually explicit deepfakes, denial of crimes against humanity and manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group, among other charges.

In addition, prosecutors filed a request for “voluntary interviews” of Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X from 2023 to 2025, scheduled for April 20.

Employees of the platform X have also been summoned that same week in April to be heard as witnesses, the statement said.

A spokesperson for X did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

In a message posted on X, the Paris prosecutors’ office announced the ongoing searches and said it was leaving the platform while calling on followers to join on other social media.

“At this stage, the conduct of the investigation is based on a constructive approach, with the aim of ultimately ensuring that the X platform complies with French law, as it operates on the national territory,” the prosecutors’ statement said.

European Union police agency Europol “is supporting the French authorities in this”, Europol spokesperson Jan Op Gen Oorth told The Associated Press, without elaborating.

The investigation was first opened following reports by a French lawmaker alleging that biased algorithms on X were likely to have distorted the functioning of an automated data processing system.

It was later expanded after X’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok generated posts that allegedly denied the Holocaust and spread sexually explicit deepfakes, the statement said. Holocaust denial is a crime in France.

Grok wrote in a widely shared post in French that gas chambers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp were designed for “disinfection with Zyklon B against typhus” rather than for mass murder – language long associated with Holocaust denial.

In later posts on its X account, the chatbot acknowledged that its earlier reply was wrong, said it had been deleted and pointed to historical evidence that Zyklon B in Auschwitz gas chambers was used to kill more than 1 million people.

Grok has a history of making antisemitic comments. Musk’s company took down posts from the chatbot that appeared to praise Adolf Hitler after complaints.