X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok
by vikaveri on 2/3/2026, 10:08:52 AM
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce3ex92557jo
Comments
by: Altern4tiveAcc
> Prosecutors say they are now investigating whether X has broken the law across multiple areas.<p>This step could come before a police raid.<p>This looks like plain political pressure. No lives were saved, and no crime was prevented by harassing local workers.
2/3/2026, 1:39:21 PM
by: mhh__
I think the grok incident/s were distasteful but I can't honestly think of a reason to ban grok and not any other AI product or even photoshop.<p>I barely use it these days and think adding it to twitter is pretty meh but I view this as regulators exploiting an open goal to attack the infrastructure itself rather than grok e.g. prune-juice drinking sandal wearers in britain (many of whom are now government backbenchers) absolutely despise twitter and want to ban it ever since their team lost control. Similar vibe across the rest of europe.<p>They have (astutely, if they realise it at least) found one of the last vaguely open/mainstream spaces for dissenting thought and are thus almost definitely plotting to shut it down. Reddit is completely captured. The right is surging dialectically at the moment but it is genuinely reliant on twitter. The centre-left is basically dead so it doesn't get the same value from bluesky / their parts of twitter.
2/4/2026, 4:23:44 AM
by: isodev
Good and honestly it’s high time. There used to be a time when we could give corps the benefit of the doubt but that time is clearly over. Beyond the CSAM, X is a cesspool of misinformation and generally the worst examples of humanity.
2/4/2026, 4:27:27 AM
by: techblueberry
I'm not saying I'm entirely against this, but just out of curiosity, what do they hope to find in a raid of the french offices, a folder labeled "Grok's CSAM Plan"?
2/3/2026, 12:34:51 PM
by: stickfigure
Honest question: What does it mean to "raid" the offices of a tech company? It's not like they have file cabinets with paper records. Are they just seizing employee workstations?<p>Seems like you'd want to subpoena source code or gmail history or something like that. Not much interesting in an office these days.
2/3/2026, 6:13:35 PM
by: ta9000
Guess that will be a SpaceX problem soon enough. What a mess.
2/3/2026, 7:54:24 PM
by: verdverm
France24 article on this: <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/france/20260203-paris-prosecutor-s-cybercrime-unit-raids-x-s-french-office" rel="nofollow">https://www.france24.com/en/france/20260203-paris-prosecutor...</a><p>lol, they summoned Elon for a hearing on 420<p>"Summons for voluntary interviews on April 20, 2026, in Paris have been sent to Mr. Elon Musk and Ms. Linda Yaccarino, in their capacity as de facto and de jure managers of the X platform at the time of the events,
2/3/2026, 6:15:48 PM
by: justaboutanyone
This sort of thing will be <i>great</i> for the SpaceX IPO :/
2/4/2026, 12:58:25 AM
by: robtherobber
> The prosecutor's office also said it was leaving X and would communicate on LinkedIn and Instagram from now on.<p>I mean, perhaps it's time to completely drop these US-owned, closed-source, algo-driven controversial platforms, and start treating the communication with the public that funds your existence in different terms. The goal should be to reach as many people, of course, but also to ensure that the method and medium of communication is in the interest of the public at large.
2/3/2026, 10:23:06 AM
by: darepublic
I remember encountering questionable hentai material (by accident) back in the Twitter days. But back then twitter was a leftist darling
2/4/2026, 1:34:18 AM
by: lukasm
This is a show of resolve.<p>"Uh guys, little heads up: there are some agents of federal law enforcement raiding the premises, so if you see that. That’s what that is."
2/3/2026, 11:40:14 PM
by: TZubiri
Why would X have offices in France? I'm assuming it's just to hire French workers? Probably leftover from the Pre Acquisition era.<p>Or is there any France-specific compliance that must be done in order to operate in that country?
2/3/2026, 8:47:42 PM
by: r721
Another discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46872894">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46872894</a>
2/3/2026, 7:15:59 PM
by: pogue
Finally, someone is taking action against the CSAM machine operating seemingly without penalty.
2/3/2026, 10:21:10 AM
by: jongjong
Once you've worked long enough in the software industry, you start to understand it's all just a fully planned economy.
2/3/2026, 10:45:09 PM
by: scotty79
Facebook offices should routinely raided for aiding and profitting from various scams propagated through ads on this platform.
2/3/2026, 7:16:33 PM
by: tomlockwood
Elon's in the files asking Epstein about "wild parties" and then doesn't seem to care about all this. Easy to draw a conclusion here.
2/3/2026, 8:24:24 PM
by: etchalon
[flagged]
2/3/2026, 6:07:42 PM
by: kalterdev
Yet another nail
2/3/2026, 8:07:00 PM
by: ChrisMarshallNY
<i>> They have also summoned billionaire owner Elon Musk for questioning.</i><p>Good luck with that...
2/3/2026, 10:11:27 PM
by: tehjoker
It's cool that not every law enforcement agency in the world is under the complete thumb of U.S. based billionaires.
2/3/2026, 9:34:32 PM
by: afavour
I’m sure Musk is going to say this is about free speech in an attempt to gin up his supporters. It isn’t. It’s about generating and distributing non consensual sexual imagery, including of minors. And, when notified, doing nothing about it. If anything it should be an embarrassment that France are the only ones doing this.<p>(it’ll be interesting to see if this discussion is allowed on HN. Almost every other discussion on this topic has been flagged…)
2/3/2026, 12:19:52 PM
by: SilverElfin
Surprised the EU hasn’t banned it yet given that the platform is manipulated by Musk to destabilize Europe and move it towards the far right. The child abuse feels like a smaller problem compared to that risk.
2/3/2026, 4:31:50 PM
by: sleepybrett
I guess this means that building the neverending 'deepfake CSAM on demand machine' was a bad idea.
2/3/2026, 10:38:55 PM
by: pu_pe
I suppose those are the offices from SpaceX now that they merged.
2/3/2026, 12:10:09 PM
by: hereme888
That's one way to steal the intellectual property and trade secrets of an AI company more successful than any French LLMs. And maybe accidentally leak confidential info.
2/4/2026, 12:23:51 AM
by: vessenes
Interesting. This is basically the second enforcement on speech / images that France has done - first was Pavel Durov @ Telegram. He eventually made changes in Telegram's moderation infrastructure and I think was allowed to leave France sometime last year.<p>I don't love heavy-handed enforcement on speech issues, but I do really like a heterogenous cultural situation, so I think it's interesting and probably to the overall good to have a country pushing on these matters very hard, just as a matter of keeping a diverse set of global standards, something that adds cultural resilience for humanity.<p>linkedin is not a replacement for twitter, though. I'm curious if they'll come back post-settlement.
2/3/2026, 11:59:58 AM