Geo-Specific
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Standards, Regulations & Compliance
Social Media Network Faces Legal Barrage From France, United Kingdom and Spain
France, the United Kingdom and Spain all laid into Elon Musk’s X on Tuesday, with an extraordinary legal barrage that came shortly after the mogul announced his SpaceX rocket venture had bought xAI, of which X is a subsidiary.
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In the space of a few hours, French authorities raided X’s office in Paris, the British privacy regulator opened a formal investigation of X and xAI, and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced legal proposals that would criminalize algorithmic manipulation and the amplification of illegal content, making executive like Musk personally liable.
Both the French and British actions were explicitly about X’s distribution of child sexual abuse images that had been generated by its in-house AI chatbot, Grok. Sánchez’s proposals were less narrowly targeted, but he namechecked Grok as a source of potential legal violations.
The Paris prosecutor’s office announced its raid in an X post, in which it also took the opportunity to say it was abandoning the platform – it will now stick to LinkedIn and Instagram. In a more detailed statement, it said Europol had been present at the raid, which was related to the investigation into Grok’s sexually explicit deepfakes and dissemination of Holocaust-denial content that is illegal in France, as well as its alleged manipulation of its recommendation algorithm to push hate speech.
The French authorities also said they had summoned Musk and former X CEO Linda Yaccarino for voluntary interviews on April 20. The date choice may indicate that someone in the Paris prosecutor’s office has a keen sense of irony, given the mercurial centibillionaire’s well-documented enthusiasm for 420 jokes, a slangy reference to smoking marijuana.
The office began investigating X just over a year ago, after a French lawmaker complained about the platform’s algorithmic changes and promotion of illegal hate speech. The probe gradually broadened to take in the sexual deepfake issue, after Grok last month sparked a global backlash by generating images depicting real women and children in a state of undress.
Over in London, the Information Commissioner’s Office said Tuesday that it was formally investigating X and xAI over Grok’s behavior. This is actually the second formal investigation of the issue in the U.K., after the communications regulator Ofcom – the enforcer of the country’s online content rules – opened a probe in January (see: UK Probes X Over AI Deepfake Porn).
The ICO, which is increasingly acting as a regulator of AI platforms, is coming at it from a somewhat different angle. It is looking into whether Grok unlawfully processed personal data, and whether it had safeguards against the generation of harmful manipulated images.
“The reports about Grok raise deeply troubling questions about how people’s personal data has been used to generate intimate or sexualized images without their knowledge or consent, and whether the necessary safeguards were put in place to prevent this. Losing control of personal data in this way can cause immediate and significant harm,” said William Malcolm, the ICO regulatory risk and innovation chief. “This is particularly the case where children are involved.”
“Where we find obligations have not been met, we will take action to protect the public,” Malcom added.
Ofcom also provided an update on its X investigation, saying on Tuesday that it was not investigating xAI’s standalone Grok service because the Online Safety Act that it is enforcing does not cover chatbots. “We can only take action on online harms covered by the Act, using the powers we have been granted. Any changes to these powers would be a matter for Government and Parliament,” the regulator said in a statement. “The Secretary of State has said that the Government will look at how chatbots should be regulated and we are supporting that work.”
The British probes come with the threat of massive fines – up to 4% of global annual revenue for data-protection violations, and up to 10% for violating the Online Safety Act. The European Commission also opened an investigation into X over the Grok scandal a week ago, which could lead to a fine of up to 6% of global annual revenue under the EU Digital Services Act.
Musk announced SpaceX’s purchase of xAI and X on Monday, promising that the merger will aid his dream of building a million AI-data-center satellites. The move is widely seen as a way to fund xAI’s astronomical AI-development costs. SpaceX is expected to launch an IPO this year, so would-be investors should be keeping a close eye on its regulatory liabilities.
Those liabilities could get personal for Musk in Spain, where – per a government statement – Prime Minister Sánchez spoke Tuesday about the need to “address the abuses of large digital platforms and guarantee a safe, democratic digital environment that respects fundamental rights.”
Sánchez’s headline proposal was an Australia-style ban on under-16s using social media – something the U.K. government is also considering – but he also promised to criminalize algorithmic manipulation and to make social-media executives legally responsible if their platforms failed to remove illegal content, including hate speech. The socialist leader also said he would work with the Spanish public prosecutor’s office to find ways to crack down on potential violations by Grok, TikTok and Instagram.
Sánchez also announced a program for tracking the spread of hate and polarization on digital platforms. Spain will coordinate “stricter, faster and more effective regulation of social-media platforms” with several other European countries.
Sánchez recently had a virtual run-in with Musk after his government green-lit plans to regularize 500,000 undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. Musk, whose anti-immigrant views have shaped X’s policy changes in recent years, retweeted a conspiracy theory that Sánchez was engaging in “electoral engineering” in favor of the left, adding the comment, “Wow”. The prime minister then defended the move in an English-language video, asking, ‘When did empathy become something exceptional?'”
At the time of publication, neither Musk nor U.S. President Donald Trump – who takes a similarly dim view of European content regulation – had responded to the Franco-Anglo-Spanish broadside. X did not respond to a request for comment, although the company typically responds to media requests with an automated response stating that the “legacy media lies.”