By Euronews
Published on •Updated
The Paris prosecutor’s office said on Tuesday that the French offices of Elon Musk’s social media platform X were being searched as part of a recently launched investigation.
The prosecutor’s cybercrime unit is conducting the searches with the support of Europol and the French police’s own cybercrime department, it said in a post on X.
The action is related to an investigation opened in January 2025, the prosecutor added.
The office said Musk and former X chief executive officer Linda Yaccarino had been summoned to appear at hearings on 20 April as part of the investigation.
The probe was launched after centrist lawmaker Eric Bothorel raised concerns of algorithmic bias on X and alleged interference in its management after Musk acquired the social media network in 2022, according to French newspaper Le Monde.
A separate complaint was raised by a cybersecurity director within the civil service, who said changes to X’s algorithm had amplified “nasty political content,” Le Monde reported.
The prosecutor’s office previously said that the two people alleged the suspected use of X’s algorithm for the “purposes of foreign interference”.
“The investigation was expanded following other reports denouncing the operation of Grok on the X platform, which led to the dissemination of Holocaust denial content and sexual deepfakes,” it said in a statement on Tuesday.
In November, Paris prosecutors said that they would investigate artificial intelligence chatbot Grok — built by Musk’s company xAI and integrated into X — after it generated French-language posts that questioned the use of gas chambers at Auschwitz.
More recently, Grok has sparked a global backlash by allowing users capabilities to create nonconsensual sexually explicit material of women and children.
The prosecutor’s office also said on Tuesday that it was leaving X and told users to “find us on LinkedIn and Instagram”.
