“France launches criminal investigation into Musk’s X over algorithm manipulation”, July 11, 2025

…French prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into X over allegations that the company owned by billionaire Elon Musk manipulated its algorithms for the purposes of “foreign interference.”

Magistrate Laure Beccuau said in a statement Friday that prosecutors had launched the probe on Wednesday and were looking into whether the social media giant broke French law by altering its algorithms and fraudulently extracting data from users.

The criminal investigation comes on the heels of an inquiry launched in January, and is based on complaints from a lawmaker and an unnamed senior civil servant, Beccuau said.

A complaint that sparked the initial January inquiry accused X of spreading “an enormous amount of hateful, racist, anti-LGBT+ and homophobic political content, which aims to skew the democratic debate in France.”

POLITICO has reached out to X for comment…

The European Commission has separately been investigating the Musk-owned platform for almost two years now, on suspicion of breaching its landmark platforms regulation, the Digital Services Act.

The spread of misinformation is part of that probe, but the Commission added X’s algorithms to the probe in January after Musk hosted and streamed an interview with far-right German party leader Alice Weidel…