As a dramatic escalation of the existing legal battle between European regulators and Elon Musk, French authorities mounted a wave of synchronized raids on the offices of X (formerly Twitter) throughout France. The operation, by the Paris Prosecutor’s Office, came against the firm’s regional offices and technical hubs today. The raids represent an expansive preliminary investigation into the platform’s supposed systemic failure to tackle illegal content such as hate speech, falsehoods, or the glamorization of terrorism.
A Dawn Operation in Paris and Beyond
The raids had started in early morning hours, with officers from the Brigade for the Repression of Cybercrime (BL2C) entering X’s main Paris office. Simultaneous actions were also reported in Lyon and Marseille, where X's smaller executive and technical footprint is in Lyon and Marseille. Sources inside the French Ministry of Justice said the judicial police took physical servers, laptop computers, and internal documents. Internal communications linked to "moderation bypass" policies and instructions given to the skeleton staff remaining in France following Musk's mass layoffs in 2023 are believed to be the focus of the seizure.
Why Are the Makers of X Facing Heat?
But the French judiciary has become increasingly vocal over X’s failure to adhere to the DSA and the immediate French laws that require the removal of illegal content. The current inquiry is allegedly based on three key facts:
- Refusal to Cooperate: The allegation that X refused to obey court demands for user data in criminal cases.
- Inadequate Moderation: Proof that the platform’s automation engine wasn’t good enough to either spot and remove hate content that specifically went after French national safety.
- Algorithmic Promotion: Whether X’s algorithms algorithmically promoted inflammatory content with the intent to generate more clicks, against French safety rules.
Musk’s Resistance to Europe vs. European Sovereignty
Elon Musk is known for its frequent championing of "absolute free speech," and he has derisively defended French regulatory warnings as "censorship" during earlier episodes. But prosecutors in Paris stressed that this is a criminal probe to find whether the company is complicit with the spread of illegal content. “No company, no matter how far out of the world or how big of a mindset its owner, is above the laws of the French republic,” a spokesman for the Paris prosecutor’s Office said after the raids. “The platform has a duty of care that it has consistently and consciously ignored.”
What This Means for the Platform
The raids are the most offensive physical enforcement action to date by a European country against a major social media platform in the past decade.
- Potential Fines: If X is convicted of systemic negligence, X could face penalties peaking up to 6% of its global turnover.
- Operational Ban: In a worst-case scenario, French regulators might attempt to block the service’s IP addresses in the country, a step already under discussion by the French Senate.
- Employee Interrogations: It's also rumored, for example, that multiple senior workers retained in the French division were summoned to be interviewed as “assisted witnesses.”
The Global Ripple Effect
The raids in France have been monitored by the European Commission in Brussels. If French authorities are able to find evidence of gross negligence or intentional violations of the DSA, it could trigger a coordinated European Union-wide crackdown on the platform.
As of Tuesday evening, Elon Musk did not release an official statement, but did post the cryptic “!!” on X in response to a news report about the Paris raids.
