[ Flash ] Raided X

The preliminary criminal probe against X launched last summer drags on, steeped as ever in the weaponization of justice.

The Paris prosecutor’s office presses ahead with a case against X it knows full well is doomed.

The political motivations behind the two criminal referals filed in January 2025 are glaringly obvious. We laid them bare back when the preliminary investigation was launched last July.

France v. X

The Paris prosecutor’s office has now openly confessed its mission creep in black and white. In today’s press release—dated February 3, 2026— prosecutor Laure Beccuau declares (third pragraph): “This investigation is, at this stage, part of a constructive approach, with the ultimate objective of guaranteeing the conformity of the X platform to French laws, insofar as it operates on French territory.”

Here is the press release.

Since when does criminal justice play compliance officer? That’s the job of administrative regulators—the CNIL for data protection, ARCOM for DSA compliance, the DGCCRF for consumer affairs, or even European DSA enforcers under the EU Commission. French criminal law exists to prosecute and punish criminal offenses, not to coax corporations into “conformity” through raids, summons, and veiled threats of prosecution.

Beccuau’s phrasing exposes the charade: the probe isn’t truly about crimes—it’s a fishing expedition, with the real aim of forcing X to bend to French (and Brussels) preferences on content moderation, algorithms, and speech.

Criminal proceedings aren’t negotiation sessions or audits; they’re accusatory, adversarial, and punitive when evidence justifies it. Here, the tone reeks of preemptive coercion: come explain yourselves to the police, hand over what we want, or face escalation.

When a Renaissance (Macronist) MP and an anonymous senior civil servant invoke Article 40 of the Code of Criminal Procedure to refer in january 2025 to the Paris public prosecutor a “genuine danger and threat to our democracies” stemming from a “major modification to the X platform’s algorithm, which has led to the massive promotion of hateful, racist, anti-LGBT+, and homophobic political content aimed at distorting democratic debate in France,” one struggles to identify any actual crime.

Observe the exquisite timing: these twin referals landed in perfect sync with the “HelloQuitteX” (now “Escape X”) campaign. Coincidences? We stopped believing in those long ago. The Twitter Files France have already exposed the intricate back-channel machinery—proxies and all—that lets political power and the French state apply pressure while maintaining plausible deniability. This racket has been running since the 1972 Pleven law.

Let us remind everyone: “hate” is not a legal category; it’s an emotion, and the law cannot punish feelings. Last year, landmark rulings in French courts pertaining to the DSA reaffirmed that censorship is exclusively the judiciary’s domain and can only target manifestly unlawful content demonstrated by concrete evidence. Freedom of expression remains the rule.

French criminal law demands strict interpretation: prosecutors and judges cannot chase phantoms or pursue nebulous theories; they are bound by the letter of the statute.

Yet here we are: armed with two fanciful complaints, studies from censorship-happy NGOs bankrolled by American foundations (Soros, Omidyarand and their ilks), and French “researchers”—we’d wager David Chavalarias, the mathematician who masterminded HelloQuitteX, features prominently—the Paris prosecutors unleashed the cyber police for a raid.

Charges? Organized fraud in automated data processing, organized fraudulent data extraction, organized illicit platform administration. Seriously? Well, X’s core business is to collect, collate, analyse and exploit data and provide a social networking platform.

This will collapse into a judicial comedy, much like the indictments of Pavel Durov. The real issue there isn’t algorithmic manipulation or complicity in a laundry list of offenses—it’s the inconvenient fact that Telegram may technically holds years of presidential, governmental, and parliamentary communications. France’s elite, blissfully ignorant of technology, treated it as a secure app, despite its client-server architecture, unaudited proprietary algorithms, and lack of default end-to-end encryption.

X’s algorithms are intellectual property—and the core product. The company can tweak them freely. The main target of the probe is the recommendation engine, which tailors content based on user preferences, browsing data, and geolocation. Elon Musk has zero incentive to break the law.

Proving criminal intent will be difficult. Ask any CFO if they blindly trust their ERP system’s output; they’ll admit to confidence in proper legal compliance configuration but acknowledge inevitable glitches. That’s why accounts are audited. Targeted advertising based on prohibited criteria (sexual orientation, etc.) ? Large databases produce errors. Always.

Moreover, X France is merely a commercial shell: it sells subscriptions and ads, handles creator monetization payments, handles marketing, PR public affairs and nothing more. It doesn’t run the social network, manage servers, handle user data or conduct R&D. Its operations are deliberately firewalled for security purposes from X’s core activities (based in Ireland for Europe), whose strategic assets—algorithms and user data—are intangible.

French courts have twice ruled that X France SAS and its executives cannot be held liable for X Corp’s actions (see Twitter Files France, sections H onward). Paris’ prosecutor is barking up the wrong tree. The raid will likely yield zilch, but media circus.

Grok allegedly generated negationist content and porn deepfakes? Then prosecute every generative AI on the planet—they all do it under the right prompt. When will people grasp that AI isn’t “intelligent”? It doesn’t understand, think, or believe; it computes. Feed it the right sequence, and any model will “prove” the gas chambers never existed.

And now the summons for Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino for a police interview on April, 20? Pure commedia dell’arte.

Complying with a police summons is mandatory under threat of arrest warrant—enforceable only if you’re in France. Neither Musk nor Yaccarino resides here. Compliance requires formal mutual legal assistance from U.S. authorities at the request of France. Don’t hold your breath for them to show up at the Gendarmerie Nationale’s cyber unit’s doorstep.

Throwing in Europol for a pan-European gloss—while the agency accomplishes little without FBI, DEA, or other U.S. federal muscle—only underscores bureaucratic amateurism. Across the Atlantic, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee drives a legitimate, democratically grounded probe (Congress alone holds legislative initiative), now two years deep, with real teeth. The EU lacks that legitimacy.

Another “coincidence” that’s anything but coincidental: the raid on X’s Paris offices unfolded on the exact same day—February 3, 2026—that the U.S. House Judiciary Committee dropped the bombshell second installment of its foreign censorship probe. Titled “The Foreign Censorship Threat, Part II: Europe’s Decade-Long Campaign to Censor the Global Internet and How it Harms American Speech in the United States”, the 160-page interim staff report is devastating in its detail.

Backed by subpoenaed nonpublic documents from Big Tech (including internal emails and communications with the European Commission), the report lays bare a ten-year effort by Brussels to pressure major platforms into adopting global content moderation rules that directly suppress speech protected under the First Amendment.

Framed as fighting “hate speech” or “disinformation,” the EU’s campaign has targeted true information and core political discourse on COVID-19 origins and vaccines, mass migration, transgender issues, and more. The Digital Services Act (DSA) is portrayed as the culmination of this push: a tool to coerce platforms into worldwide censorship, infringing on American free expression on American soil.

The report doesn’t stop at generalities. It accuses the European Commission of meddling in elections across EU member states—Romania, France, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Ireland—by demanding platforms throttle narratives threatening establishment power. This isn’t abstract; it’s backed by evidence of closed-door meetings (over 100 since 2020) and successful arm-twisting that forces global changes affecting U.S. users.

The Digital Services Act itself sprang from the Obama administration demands during 2015 personal data-transfer talks with the EU after the CJEU struck down Safe Harbor (Schrems I). The goal: outsource censorship of American speech to Europeans, circumventing the First Amendment.

The relentless targeting of X is nakedly political. Old Twitter was an elite echo chamber—under 30% of French social media users, mostly highly educated upper-class (71% male)—where dissent was verboten. A perfect Platonic cave, convincing that narrow socio-cultural clique their views were mainstream. Musk’s acquisition restored free speech (within local legal bounds) and let majority opinions flood in.

The establishment cannot tolerate it. As we noted in the piece below: France’s ruling class believes it shall only converse with the “enlightened” 30% of the electorate capable of “understanding.” The rest? Top-down communication only. Verticality reigns.

In the mean time, in Europe…