Paris (France) (AFP) – Billionaire Elon Musk has been summoned for a voluntary interview in Paris on Monday as part of a French probe into his social media platform X, though it remains unclear if he will appear. French authorities issued a summons for Musk in February as part of an investigation, launched in January 2025, into allegations that X’s algorithm was used to interfere in French politics.
The probe was later expanded to include an investigation into X’s AI chatbot Grok’s dissemination of Holocaust denials and sexual deepfakes. In early February, French prosecutors searched the Paris offices of X, in what the social media giant — which has denied any wrongdoing — slammed as “politicized” raids and an “abusive judicial act”. At the time, Paris prosecutors also summoned Musk and then-CEO Linda Yaccarino for voluntary interviews as the “de facto and de jure managers of the X platform at the time of the events,” a move Musk called a “political attack”. Yaccarino resigned as CEO of X in July last year after two years at the helm of the company.
In February, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said X employees had also been summoned to appear between April 20 and 24 “to be heard as witnesses”. But whether or not those invited for voluntary questioning appear would not be “an obstacle to the continuation of the investigation,” the Paris prosecutor’s office said on Saturday. Officials have not offered any details on the location or time of Musk’s scheduled interview.
The French investigation focuses on several suspected criminal offences including complicity in possessing child sexual abuse material and denial of crimes against humanity. The social media company in July called the probe “politically motivated”.
-‘Serious concerns’-
The French investigation comes as part of a broader international backlash against Grok after it emerged that users could sexualize images of women and children using simple text prompts such as “put her in a bikini” or “remove her clothes”. It generated an estimated three million sexualized images — mostly of women, though also 23,000 that appeared to depict children — in 11 days, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit watchdog, said in late January.
In a separate investigation, Britain’s data regulator in February launched investigations into Musk’s X and xAI over “serious concerns” regarding whether the companies complied with personal data laws when it came to Grok’s generation of sexualized deepfakes. In late January, the European Union also hit X with a probe over Grok’s generation of sexualized deepfake images of women and minors.
© 2024 AFP
