The French headquarters of Elon Musk‘s X social media platform were raided by prosecutors amid an investigation into alleged cybercrime as he and former chief executive Linda Yaccarino were summoned for questioning.
“A search is under way by the cybercrime unit of the Paris prosecutor’s office, the national police cyber unit and Europol,” the Paris prosecutors’ office said in a translated post on X Tuesday (February 3), adding that it would no longer post on the social media platform moving forward.
The department confirmed that Musk and Yaccarino, who resigned from her role of CEO last July, were summoned for voluntary questioning “in their capacity as de facto and de jure managers of the X platform at the time of the events.”
The prosecutor’s office said it was probing “alleged complicity” in offenses made on the platform which include the spreading of child abuse images and sexually explicit deepfakes, denying crimes against humanity and manipulating an automated data processing system as part of an organized group. The French authority launched its investigation in January 2025 after a center-right member of parliament, Éric Bothorel, filed a complaint accusing the platform of having biased algorithms, which were expected to be caused by a distorted data processing system that affected recommended content.
Bothorel expressed “deep concern” at “recent algorithm changes” which he claimed were brought on by “apparent interference in management” since Musk purchased X, then known as Twitter, in 2022. Other complaints said the changes made by Musk, who openly campaigned for and was a donor to President Donald Trump in the 2024 election, led to a surge in “nauseating political content.”
The X investigation was later expanded amid reports of the website’s AI chatbot, Grok, allegedly sharing Holocaust denial talking points and sharing sexually explicit deepfakes. X had previously said it didn’t intend to comply with the demands of French authorities when asked about the investigation last summer, claiming it was “politically motivated” and denied allegations of algorithm manipulation and “fraudulent data extraction.”
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