Paris Prosecutors Raid Offices of Elon Musk’s X in Child Sex Abuse, Deepfake Investigation

The Paris prosecutor’s office said on Tuesday it had begun a search of X’s French offices as part of an investigation into the spread of child sexual abuse images and deepfakes on the Elon Musk-owned platform.

The office’s cybercrime unit opened its investigation into the company in January last year, focused on whether X has allowed the possession and spread of sexually explicit images of minors, pornographic deepfakes, Holocaust denialism and manipulation of some of its automated data processing, among other charges. It has also invited Musk and former X CEO Linda Yaccarino in for “voluntary interviews” on April 20 to discuss the investigation, it said in a statement.

The office also said it would leave the platform, encouraging people to follow it on LinkedIn and Instagram. It deleted its X account shortly afterward.

“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’ office said in its statement.

An X spokesperson did not respond to an immediate request for comment. Yaccarino did not respond to an immediate request for comment.

The investigation is one of multiple governmental pursuits of the social media company after Grok, its AI-powered chatbot, was accused of sharing nonconsensual sexual images and misinformation about the Holocaust, such as how many people died in Auschwitz gas chambers. Holocaust denialism is a crime in France.

The European Union said last month it opened an investigation into X over Grok’s ability to let users generate sexually explicit images of others without their consent. The company eventually restricted the feature after it sparked a global backlash.

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