If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Paris prosecutors announced Thursday that their investigation into Elon Musk’s social platform X has been upgraded to a full criminal probe. The Paris prosecutor’s office is now asking investigating magistrates to formally charge Musk, former X CEO Linda Yaccarino, and three companies linked to the platform, including xAI and X.AI Holdings Corp. If they refuse to appear for those charges, prosecutors say judges can issue warrants that carry the same legal weight. The charges cover a long and growing list of alleged offenses: Complicity in possessing and distributing sexual images. Nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfakes. Denial of crimes against humanity. Fraudulent extraction of user data. Violation of the secrecy of electronic correspondence. Manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group. Illegal collection of personal data without adequate security. The announcement came just three weeks after the US Department of Justice refused to cooperate with the French investigation, calling it an attempt to regulate American speech through foreign criminal law. France pushed ahead anyway. A speech case wearing a criminal costume The investigation did not begin with deepfakes or child safety. It began with politics. French Member of Parliament Éric Bothorel, a member of President Macron’s centrist Renaissance party, filed a complaint in 2025 alleging that X’s algorithm had been manipulated for the purpose of “foreign interference” in French politics. Bothorel accused the platform of narrowing “diversity of voices and options” after Musk’s takeover and cited Musk’s “personal interventions” in moderation decisions. A second complaint, from a senior official in French public administration, alleged the same thing, claiming to observe a surge of “hateful, racist, anti-LGBTQ” content aimed at skewing democratic debate. The theory of the case converts an editorial choice into a crime. Every platform’s algorithm is an editorial product. It decides what content gets amplified and what gets buried. When a government prosecutes a platform owner because it doesn’t like how that algorithm ranks political speech, it is asserting the power to dictate how information reaches the public. That is censorship by prosecution. By July 2025, prosecutors wanted access to the algorithm itself to examine it for “bias.” X refused. The company called the probe “politically motivated” and said it would not comply with demands to hand over its recommendation system for state inspection. Then the investigation expanded and the charges got heavier. How serious charges get stacked onto a political case In November 2025, Grok, the AI chatbot built by xAI and integrated into X, generated French-language posts questioning the use of gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Auschwitz Memorial condemned the output. X deleted the post. Grok attributed the error to a programming mistake. Holocaust denial is a criminal offense in France. In late December 2025 and early January 2026, Grok’s image generation capabilities were widely abused by users to create nonconsensual images of women in bikinis. xAI restricted image generation to paid subscribers on January 9 and said it had blocked nudification capabilities by January 14. Prosecutors added these allegations to the existing investigation. This is how speech prosecutions work in modern Europe. You start with an accusation about algorithms and political content. You add serious criminal charges later. The original political motive gets buried under the weight of the new allegations, and anyone who questions the prosecution can be accused of defending child exploitation. The charges provide cover. The algorithm complaint provides the engine. The prosecutors’ own statement from February described the investigation as having “the objective of ultimately ensuring the compliance of the X platform with French law.” That’s compliance with the state’s vision of how a platform should operate. The raid, the no-show, and the DOJ On February 3, 2026, the Paris prosecutor’s cybercrime division raided X’s offices in Paris alongside French national police and Europol. X called the raid “an abusive act of law enforcement theater designed to achieve illegitimate political objectives.” Musk called it “a political attack.” Both Musk and Yaccarino were summoned for “voluntary interviews” on April 20. Neither appeared. Under French law, prosecutors can issue arrest warrants for suspects who skip voluntary interviews, which makes the word “voluntary” carry less meaning than advertised. Two days before those interviews were scheduled, the US Department of Justice sent French law enforcement a two-page letter refusing to help. “This investigation seeks to use the criminal legal system in France to regulate a public square for the free expression of ideas and opinions in a manner contrary to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution,” the letter stated. The DOJ added that France’s three requests for assistance in 2026 “constitute an effort to entangle the United States in a politically charged criminal proceeding aimed at wrongfully regulating through prosecution the business activities of a social media platform.” An xAI official responded publicly. “We are grateful to the Justice Department for rejecting this effort by a prosecutor in Paris to compel our CEO and several employees to sit for interviews,” the official told the Wall Street Journal. “We hope the Parisian authorities will now come to their senses, recognize that there is no wrongdoing here, and terminate their baseless investigation.” The DOJ’s letter puts American mutual-assistance treaties off the table for European speech prosecutions. France was the first to find out. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. 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