X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok
bbc.com
bbc.com
- you are thinking about a company doing good things the right way. You are thinking about a company abiding by the law, storing data on its own server, having good practices, etc.
The moment a company starts to do dubious stuff then good practices start to go out the window. People write email with cryptic analogies, people start deleting emails, ... then as the circumvention become more numerous and complex, there needs to still be a trail in order to remain understandable. That trail will be in written form somehow and that must be hidden. It might be paper, it might be shadow IT but the point is that if you are not just forgetting to keep track of coffee pods at the social corner, you will leave traces.
So yes, raids do make sense BECAUSE it's about recurring complex activities that are just too hard to keep in the mind of one single individual over long periods of time.
So no, don't be coy and pretend that all governments are like American institutions.
Iffy on that front, actually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...
And, to spell it out, it is also funny to see who was complaining about it back then. On the free speech grounds, not less, literally people trying to dismantle democracy and create autocracy. Russian soldiers and operators, Maria Butina, Medvedev and Elon Musk. Bad faith actors having bad faith arguments.
Of course they're going to raid their offices! They're investigating a crime! It would be quite literally insane if they tried to prosecute them for a crime and how up to court having not even attempted basic steps to gather evidence!
"it is done because it's always done so"
If this isn't the entire purpose of law enforcement then what is exactly?
When police raid a grow-op they often may only have a search warrant but they end up making several arrests because they find people actively commiting crimes when they execute the warrant.
More normally it looks like e.g. this in the UK: https://news.sky.com/video/police-raid-hundreds-of-businesse...
CyberGEND more often seem to do smalltime copyright infringement enforcement, but there are a number of authorities with the right to conduct raids.
I’m sorry but that’s absurd even amidst the cacophony of absurdity that comprises public discourse these days.
How was TikTok held liable for the crimes it was accused of?
It always seemed to me that TikTok was doing the same things that US based social networks were doing, and the only problem various parties could agree on with this was that it was foreign-owned.
Police raids offices literally investigating CSA: "nooo police should not physically invade, what happened to good old electronic surveillance?"
That was so that later in court it could be demonstrated the data hadn't been handed over voluntarily.
They also disconnected and blocked all overseas VPN's in the process, so local law enforcement only would get access to local data.
Because that country and the businesses that support that are going to get RICH from such a service.
Do you mean they will be pure worker surveillance systems, or did you mean “from” instead of “to”?
I used this when an employer was forcing me to use Windows and I needed Linux tools to work efficiently so I connected home. Goes through firewalls, proxies, etc.
Anyway if you want to host this not at home but a cloud provider there was HavenCo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HavenCo don't ask me how I know about it, just curiosity.
1) Even when you move things to a server, or remove it from your device, evidence is still left over without your knowledge sometimes.
2) Evidence of data destruction, is in itself as the name implies, evidence. And it can be used to prove things.
For example, an ext4 journal or NTFS USN $J journal entry that shows "grok_version_2.4_schema.json" where twitter is claiming grok version 2.4 was never deployed in France/UK is important. That's why tools like shred and SDelete rename files before destroying them. But even then, when those tools rename and destroy files, it stands out, it might even be worse because investigators can speculate more. It might corroborate some other piece of evidence (e.g.: sdelete's prefetch entry on windows, or download history from a browser for the same tool), and that might be a more serious charge (obstruction of justice in the US).
No platform ever should allow CSAM content.
And the fact that they didn’t even care and haven’t want to spend money for implementing guardrails or moderation is deeply concerning.
This has imho nothing to do with model censorship, but everything with allowing that kind of content on a platform
A provider should have no responsibility how the tools are used. It is on users. This is a can of worms that should stay closed, because we all lose freedoms just because of couple of bad actors. AI and tool main job is to obey. We are hurling at "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that" future with breakneck speed.
We already apply this logic elsewhere. Car makers must include seatbelts. Pharma companies must ensure safety. Platforms must moderate illegal content. Responsibility is shared when the risk is systemic.
Platforms moderating illegal content is exactly what we are arguing about, so you can't use it as an argument.
The rest cases you list are harms to the people using the tools/products. It is not harms that people using the tools inflict on third parties.
We are literally arguing about 3d printer control two topics downstream. 3d printers in theory can be used for CSAM too. So we should totally ban them - right? So are pencils, paper, lasers, drawing tablets.
If a platform encourages and doesn’t moderate at all, yes we should go after the platform.
Imagine a newspaper publishing content like that, and saying they are not responsible for their journalists
X also actively distributes and profits off of CSAM. Why shouldn't the law apply to distribution centers?
I mean, I thought that was basically already the law in the UK.
I can see practical differences between X/twitter doing moderation and the full ISP censorship, but I cannot see any differences in principle...
I mean even just calling it censorship is already trying to shove a particular bias into the picture. Is it government censorship that you aren't allowed to shout "fire!" in a crowded theater? Yes. Is that also a useful feature of a functional society? Also yes. Was that a "slippery slope"? Nope. Turns out people can handle that nuance just fine.
If LLMs should have guardrails, why should open source ones be exempt? What about people hosting models on hugging face? WHat if you use a model both distributed by and hosted by hugging face.
Yes, AI chatbots have to do everything in their power to avoid users easily generating such content.
AND
Yes, people that do so (even if done so on your self-hosted model) have to be punished.
I believe it is OK that Grok is being investigated because the point is to figure out whether this was intentional or not.
Just my opinion.
Everything I read from X's competitors in the media tells me to hate X, and hate Elon.
If we prosecute people not tools, how are we going to stop X from hurting the commercial interests of our favourite establishment politicians and legacy media?
(note that this isn't a raid on Musk personally! It's a raid on X corp for the actions of X corp and posts made under the @grok account by X corp)
——-
You’ve said that whatever is behind door number 1 is unacceptable.
Behind door number 2, “holding tool users responsible”, is tracking every item generated via AI, and being able to hold those users responsible.
If you don’t like door number 2, we have door number 3 - which is letting things be.
For any member of society, opening door 3 is straight out because the status quo is worse than reality before AI.
If you reject door 1 though, you are left with tech monitoring. Which will be challenged because of its invasive nature.
Holding Platforms responsible is about the only option that works, at least until platforms tell people they can’t do it.
What Reddit did get a lot of negative public publicity for were subreddits focused on sharing non-explicit photos of minors, but with loads of sexually charged comments. The images themselves, nobody would really object to in isolation, but the discussions surrounding the images were all lewd. So not CSAM, but still creepy and something Reddit tightly decided it didn't want on the site.
Mmkay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_under_Elon_Musk#Child_...
"As of June 2023, an investigation by the Stanford Internet Observatory at Stanford University reported "a lapse in basic enforcement" against child porn by Twitter within "recent months". The number of staff on Twitter's trust and safety teams were reduced, for example, leaving one full-time staffer to handle all child sexual abuse material in the Asia-Pacific region in November 2022."
"In 2024, the company unsuccessfully attempted to avoid the imposition of fines in Australia regarding the government's inquiries about child safety enforcement; X Corp reportedly said they had no obligation to respond to the inquiries since they were addressed to "Twitter Inc", which X Corp argued had "ceased to exist"."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cze3p1j710ko
Reports on sextortion, self-generated indecent images, and grooming via social media/messaging apps:
Snapchat 54%
Instagram 11%
Facebook 7%
WhatsApp 6-9%
X 1-2%
But I am having trouble justifying in an consistent manner why Grok / X should be liable here instead of the user. I've seen a few arguments here that mostly comes down to:
1. It's Grok the LLM generating the content, not the user.
2. The distribution. That this isn't just on the user's computer but instead posted on X.
For 1. it seems to breakdown if we look more broadly at how LLMs are used. e.g. as a coding agent. We're basically starting to treat LLMs as a higher level framework now. We don't hold vendors of programming languages or frameworks responsible if someone uses them to create CSAM. Yes LLM generated the content, but the user still provided the instructions to do so.
For 2. if Grok instead generated the content for download would the liability go away? What if Grok generated the content to be downloaded only and then the user uploaded manually to X? If in this case Grok isn't liable then why does the automatic posting (from the user's instructions) make it different? If it is, then it's not about the distribution anymore.
There are some comparisons to photoshop, that if i created a deep fake with photoshop that I'm liable not Adobe. If photoshop had a "upload to X" button, and I created CSM using photoshop and hit the button to upload to X directly, is now Adobe now liable?
What am I missing?
Because Grok and X aren't even doing the most basic filtering they could do to pretend to filter out CSAM.
That's the difference between a tool being used to commit crimes and a tool specifically designed to commit crimes.
LLMs are completely different to programming languages or even Photoshop.
You can't type a sentence and within 10 seconds get images of CSAM with Photoshop. LLMs are also built on trained material, unlike the traditional tools in Photoshop. There have been plenty CSAM found in the training data sets, but shock-horror apparently not enough information to know "where it came from". There's a non-zero chance that this CSAM Grok is vomiting out is based on "real" CSAM of people being abused.
This seems to rest on false assumptions that: (1) legal liability is exclusive, and (2) investigation of X is not important both to X’s liability and to pursuing the users, to the extent that they would also be subject to liability.
X/xAI may be liable for any or all of the following reasons:
* xAI generated virtual child pornography with the likenesses of actual children, which is generally illegal, even if that service was procured by a third party.
* X and xAI distributed virtual child pornography with the likenesses of actual children, which is generally illegal, irrespective of who generated and supplied them.
* To the extent that liability for either of the first two bullet points would be eliminated or mitigated by absence of knowledge at the time of the prohibited content and prompt action when the actor became aware, X often punished users for the prompts proucing the virtual child pornography without taking prompt action to remove the xAI-generated virtual child pornography resulting from the prompt, demonstrating knowledge and intent.
* When the epidemic of grok-generated nonconsensual, including child, pornography drew attention, X and xAI responded by attempting to monetize the capacity by limiting the tool to only paid X subscribers, showing an attempt to commercially profit from it, which is, again, generally illegal.
I still believe that the EU and aligned countries would rather have America to agree to much tighter speech controls, digital ID, ToS-based speech codes as apparently US Democrats partly or totally agree to. But if they have workable alternatives they will deal with them from a different position.
For some reason you forgot to mention "Like the US did with TikTok".
esp. when America already controls the main outlets through Android Play Store and Apple Store, and yep, they have proven to control them not just happen to host them as a country
arguably America did have valid security concerns with Huawei though, but if those are the rules then you cannot complain later on
They are tasked - and held to account by respective legislative bodies - with implementing the law as written.
Nobody wrote a law saying "Go after Grok". There is however a law in most countries about the creation and dissemination of CSAM material and non-consensual pornography. Some of that law is relatively new (the UK only introduced some of these laws in recent years), but they all predate the current wave of AI investment.
Founders, boards of directors and their internal and external advisors could:
1. Read the law and make sure any tools they build comply
2. When told their tools don't comply take immediate and decisive action to change the tools
3. Work with law enforcement to apply the law as written
Those companies, if they find this too burdensome, have the choice of not operating in that market. By operating in that market, they both implicitly agree to the law, and are required to explicitly abide by it.
They can't then complain that the law is unfair (it's not), that it's being politicised (How? By whom? Show your working), and that this is all impossible in their home market where they are literally offering presents to the personal enrichment of the President on bended knee while he demands that ownership structures of foreign social media companies like TikTok are changed to meet the agenda of himself and his administration.
So, would the EU like more tighter speech controls? Yes, they'd like implementation of the controls on free speech enshrined in legislation created by democratically appointed representatives. The alternative - algorithms that create abusive content, of women and children in particular - are not wanted by the people of the UK, the EU, or most of the rest of the World, laws are written to that effect, and are then enforced by the authorities tasked with that enforcement.
This isn't "anti-democratic", it's literally democracy in action standing up to technocratic feudalism that is an Ayn Randian-wet dream being played out by some morons who got lucky.
As someone who has lived in (and followed current affairs) in both of these countries, this is a very idealistic and naïve view. There can be a big gap between theory and practice
> There are statutory instruments (in France, constitutional clauses), that determine the independence of these authorities.
> They are tasked - and held to account by respective legislative bodies -
It's worth nothing here that the UK doesn't have separation of powers or a supreme court (in the US sense)
however it's a very mainstream point of view so i respect that he/she has laid it out pretty well, so i upvoted the comment
The European Court of Human Rights has reminded this point (e.g. 29 Mar 2010, appl. no. 3394/03), and the Court of Justice of the European Union reaches a very similar conclusion (2 Mar 2021, C-746/18): prosecutors are part of the executive hierarchy and can’t be treated as the neutral, independent judicial check some procedures require.
For a local observer, this is made obvious by the fact that the procureur, in France, always follows current political vibes, usually in just a few months delay (extremely fast, when you consider how slowly justice works in the country).
This is kind of a genuine question from me since I have no idea how these authorities are set up in France or the UK...
As in, a citizen of an EU country types x.com/CNN, because he or she wants to know the other side of some political issue between the EU and the USA, and he or she feels that the news in the EU might be biased or have misunderstood something. Would it be good or bad if the user was met with a "This website is by law not available within the EU"?
currently VPNs are too easy to use for the leadership of autocracies like the EU or the UK to be comfortable with them, so at the very least they will require for backdoors to see which citizens are watching what, and have them visited by fellows in hi-vis jackets
No there isn't.
Governments discussing such things doesn't _remotely_ mean there is a political will for them, or that they will be voted into law.
Governments are expected to research and discuss paths of legislation (and in this case, come to the conclusion banning VPNs is both harmful and ridiculous). This is how our democracies work!
Reporting government discussions as approved legislation is, at best ignorant, at worst trolling.
Or in other words: I would block the do business-part, not the access part.
CNN is a very silly example though, because .. you can just go to the CNN website separately. The one that is blocked is Russia Today and various other enemy propaganda channels.
There’s an interesting tidbit that he gained quite a few listeners when he started releasing casualty information that the British government withheld to try to keep wartime-morale high.
Lord Haw-Haw then tried to leverage that audience into a force of Nazi sympathy and a general mood of defeatism.
Anyway, fun anecdote. Enemy propaganda during wartime (or increased tensions) is harmless until it isn’t.
Also, Godwin's law, strangely.
Conveniently, at least in the US, WW2 is old enough to be “history” rather than “politics”, compared to Korea and Vietnam. Or, at least that’s the excuse I was given in AP US History when the curriculum suddenly ended at 1950. So WW2 will continue to be the most well-documented topic that we’re all educated enough about to collectively reference.
Trust me, I’d much rather speak plainly about the horrors of the atrocities that the US committed in the 20th century American but we’re not there yet because the people who grew up in the nation while it committed those atrocities still run the government and basically the nation in general.
Edit: also if it wasn’t obvious I was comparing Musk to Haw Haw. I don’t know if there is an equivalent for China
Dishonest, though? To what end? If anything, the anonymity of the internet allows me to test my more weakly-held fringe beliefs and adjust them as I receive feedback.
I get the impression that you’re not well-informed enough to have a meaningful conversation about these difficult topics, though you may hold an opinion with significant conviction. Sorry.
Sure, that's what laws are for. Surely we can still point at those laws and question their motives though.
Spanish PM plainly stated a sort of editor framework of responsibility for platforms. This is the same country that strongly advocates for Chat Control within the EU, also looking for a similar under-16 ban on social media.
So the same government is at once looking to deanonimize social media users, revoke their privacy regarding communications, and to enforce moderation standards never seen before. This is, supposedly, a center-left + left coalition mind you.
Same country that blocks a chunk of the internet when a LALIGA football match is on, too. Lawfully of course. All of this is preposterous, making it the law doesn't make that better it makes it far far worse.
Sounds like he's never been to Russia. Which is weird, given that he's Russian
My most recent case: I went on holiday to a resort in Turkey, numerous Russians, families, retired, etc. I don't pass as a Russian-speaker (but I understand quite well) and once they hear me talking other unrelated language they naturally start to speak more freely in front of me (i.e. more liberal use of swearing, and even slurs if no other Russians are around).
While sunbathing, or at the restaurant, or the pool, they were talking about daily, mundane things, same in the restaurant, etc. But when floating in pairs 20-30m from the shore? Politics.
This step could come before a police raid.
This looks like plain political pressure. No lives were saved, and no crime was prevented by harassing local workers.
The company made and released a tool with seemingly no guard-rails, which was used en masse to generate deepfakes and child pornography.
Without such clear legal definitions going after Grok while not going after photoshop is just an act of political pressure.
What you’re implying here is that Musk should be immune from any prosecution simply because he is right wing, which…
This isn’t about AI or CSAM (Have we seen any other AI companies raided by governments for enabling creation of deepfakes, dangerous misinformation, illegal images, or for flagrant industrial-scale copyright infringement?)
The difference is that the entire political Left hate and fear Elon and are desperately trying to destroy him.
One the one hand, it seems "obvious" that Grok should somehow be legally required to have guardrails stopping it from producing kiddie porn.
On the other hand, it also seems "obvious" that laws forcing 3D printers to detect and block attempts to print firearms are patently bullshit.
The thing is, I'm not sure how I can reconcile those two seemingly-obvious statements in a principled manner.
If you use a service like Grok, then you use somebody elses computer / things. X is the owner from computer that produced CP. So of course X is at least also a bit liable for producing CP.
I'd guess Elon is responsible for that product decision.
I honestly don't follow it. People creating nudes of others and using the Internet to distribute it can be sued for defamation, sure. I don't think the people hosting the service should be liable themselves, just like people hosting Tor nodes shouldn't be liable by what users of the Tor Network do.
If you’re hosting content, why shouldn’t you be responsible, because your business model is impossible if you’re held to account for what’s happening on your premises?
Without safe harbor, people might have to jump through the hoops of buying their own domain name, and hosting content themselves, would that be so bad?
I would prefer 10,000 service providers to one big one that gets to read all the plaintext communication of the entire planet.
As it stands, I have a bunch of photos on my phone that would almost certainly get flagged by over-eager/overly sensitive child porn detection — close friends and family sending me photos of their kids at the beach. I've helped bathe and dress some of those kids. There's nothing nefarious about any of it, but it's close enough that services wouldn't take the risk, and that would be a loss to us all.
(Snark aside, in your opinion are there comments on HN that dang would be criminally liable for if it weren't for safe harbor?)
You have to understand that Europe doesn't give a shit about techbro libertarians and their desire for a new Lamborghini.
There is no functionality for the users to review and approve "Grok" responses to their tweets.
Also, safe harbor doesn't apply because this is published under the @grok handle! It's being published by X under one of their brand names, it's absurd to argue that they're unaware or not consenting to its publication.
Grok makes it trivial to create fake CSAM or other explicit images. Before, if someone spent a week on photoshop to do the same, It won't be Adobe that gets the blame.
Same for 3D printers. Before, anyone could make a gun provided they have the right tools (which is very expensive), now it's being argued that 3D printers are making this more accessible. Although I would argue it's always been easy to make a gun, all you need is a piece of pipe. So I don't entirely buy the moral panic against 3D printers.
Where that threshold lies I don't know. But I think that's the crux if it. Technology is making previously difficult things easier, to the benefit of all humanity. It's just unfortunate that some less-nice things have also been included.
you cannot elaborately use a software to produce an effect that is patently illegal and accurate to your usage, and then pretend the software is to blame
Do you have any evidence for that? As far as I can tell, this is false. The only thing I saw was Grok changing photos of adults into them wearing bikinis, which is far less bad.
For obvious reasons, decent people are not about to go out and try to general child sexual abuse material to prove a point to you, if that’s what you’re asking for.
https://x.com/i/grok/share/1cd2a181583f473f811c0d58996232ab
The claim that they released a tool with "seemingly no guardrailes" is therefore clearly false. I think what instead has happened here is that some people found a hack to circumvent some of those guardrails via something like a jailbreak.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg1mzlryxeo
Also, X seem to disagree with you and admit that CSAM was being generated:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/x-blames-users-f...
Also the reason you can’t make it generate those images is because they implemented safeguards since that article was written:
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
This is because of government pressure (see Ofcom link).
I’d say you’re making yourself look foolish but you seem happy to defend nonces so I’ll not waste my time.
That post doesn't contain such an admission, it instead talks about forbidden prompting.
> Also the reason you can’t make it generate those images is because they implemented safeguards since that article was written:
That article links to this article: https://x.com/Safety/status/2011573102485127562 - which contradicts your claim that there were no guardrails before. And as I said, I already tried it a while ago, and Grok also refused to create images of naked adults then.
In response to what? If CSAM is not being generated, why aren't X just saying that? Instead they're saying "please don't do it."
> which contradicts your claim that there were no guardrails before.
From the linked post:
> However content is created or whether users are free or paid subscribers, our Safety team are working around the clock to add additional safeguards
Which was posted a full week after the initial story broke and after Ofcom started investigative action. So no, it does not contradict my point which was:
> Also the reason you can’t make it generate those images is because they implemented safeguards since that article was written:
As you quoted.
I really can't decide if you're stupid, think I and other readers are stupid, or so dedicated to defending paedophilia that you'll just tell flat lies to everyone reading your comment.
* Internet Watch Foundation
* The BBC
* The Guardian
* X themselves
* Ofcom
And believe the word of an anonymous internet account who claims to have tried to undress women using Grok for "research."
Says who? Musk?
Biased against the man asking Epstein which day would be best for the "wildest" party.
Which is good, that is the sane position to take these days.
This is how it works, at least in civil law countries. If the prosecutor has reasonable suspicious that a crime is taking place they send the so-called "judiciary police" to gather evidence. If they find none (or they're inconclusive etc...) the charges are dropped, otherwise they ask the court to go to trial.
On some occasions I take on judiciary police duties for animal welfare. Just last week I participated in a raid. We were not there to arrest anyone, just to gather evidence so the prosecutor could decide whether to press charges and go to trial.
Siezing records is usually a major step in an investigation. Its how you get evidence.
Sure it could just be harrasment, but this is also how normal police work looks. France has a reasonable judicial system so absent of other evidence i'm inclined to believe this was legit.
I wouldn't even consider this a reason if it wasn't for the fact that OpenAI and Google, and hell literally every image model out there all have the same "this guy edited this underage girls face into a bikini" problem (this was the most public example I've heard so I'm going with that as my example). People still jailbreak chatgpt, and they've poured how much money into that?
So the question becomes if it was done knowingly or recklessly, hence a police raid for evidence.
See also [0] for a legal discussion in the German context.
I think one big issue with this statement – "CSAM" lacks a precise legal definition; the precise legal term(s) vary from country to country, with differing definitions. While sexual imagery of real minors is highly illegal everywhere, there's a whole lot of other material – textual stories, drawings, animation, AI-generated images of nonexistent minors – which can be extremely criminal on one side of an international border, de facto legal on the other.
And I'm not actually sure what the legal definition is in France; the relevant article of the French Penal Code 227-23 [0] seems superficially similar to the legal definition of "child pornography" in the United States (post-Ashcroft vs Free Speech Coalition), and so some–but (maybe) not all–of the "CSAM" Grok is accused of generating wouldn't actually fall under it. (But of course, I don't know how French courts interpret it, so maybe what it means in practice is something broader than my reading of the text suggests.)
And I think this is part of the issue – xAI's executives are likely focused on compliance with US law on these topics, less concerned with complying with non-US law, in spite of the fact that CSAM laws in much of the rest of the world are much broader than in the US. That's less of an issue for Anthropic/Google/OpenAI, since their executives don't have the same "anything that's legal" attitude which xAI often has. And, as I said – while that's undoubtedly true in general, I'm unsure to what extent it is actually true for France in particular.
[0] https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/section_lc/LEGITEXT0000...
The most common French word is Pédopornographie. But my impression is the definition of that word under French law is possibly narrower than some definitions of the English acronym “CSAM”. Canadian law is much broader, and so what’s legally pédopornographie (English “child pornogaphy”) in Canada may be much closer to broad “CSAM” definitions
> The point is, X did things that are illegal in France, no matter what you call them.
Which French law are you alleging they violated? Article 227-23 du Code pénal, or something else? And how exactly are you claiming they violated it?
Note the French authorities at this time are not accusing them of violating the law. An investigation is simply a concern or suspicion of a legal violation, not a formal accusation; one possible outcome of an investigation is a formal accusation, another is the conclusion that they (at least technically) didn’t violate the law after all. I don’t think the French legal process has reached a conclusion either way yet.
One relevant case is the unpublished Court of Cassation decision 06-86.763 dated 12 septembre 2007 [0] which upheld a conviction of child pornography for importing and distributing the anime film “Twin Angels - le retour des bêtes célestes - Vol. 3". [0] However, the somewhat odd situation is that it appears that film is catalogued by the French national library, [1] although I don’t know if a catalogue entry definitively proves they possess the item. Also, art. 227-23 distinguishes between material depicting under 15s (illegal to even possess) and material depicting under 18s (only illegal to possess if one has intent to distribute); this prosecution appears to be have been brought under the latter category only-even though the individual was depicted as being under 15-suggesting this anime might not be illegal to possess in France if one has no intent to distribute it.
But this is the point - one needs to look at the details of exactly what the law says and how exactly the authorities apply it, rather than vague assertions of criminality which might not actually be true.
[0] https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/juri/id/JURITEXT000007640077/
True, but outright child porn is illegal everywhere (as you said) and the borderline legal stuff is something most of your audience is quite happy to have removed. I cannot imagine you are going to get a lot of complaints if you remove AI generated sexual images of minors, for example so it seems reasonable to play it safe.
> That's less of an issue for Anthropic/Google/OpenAI, since their executives don't have the same "anything that's legal" attitude which xAI often has.
This is also common, but it is irritating too as it means the rest of the world is stuck with silly American attitudes about things like nudity and alcohol - for example Youtube videos blurring out bits of Greek statues because they are scared of being demonetised. These are things people take kids to see in museums!
They have a court order obviously to collect evidence.
You have offered zero evidence to indicate there is 'political pressure' and that statement by prosecutors doesn't hint at that.
'No crime was prevented by harassing workers' is essentially non sequitor in this context.
It could be that that this is political nonsense, but there would have to be more details.
These issues are really hard but we have to confront them. X can alter electoral outcomes. That's where we are at.
What may they find, hypothetically? Who knows, but maybe an internal email saying, for instance, 'Management says keep the nude photo functionality, just hide it behind a feature flag', or maybe 'Great idea to keep a backup of the images, but must cover our tracks', or perhaps 'Elon says no action on Grok nude images, we are officially unaware anything is happening.'
Otoh it is musk.
Seems like it's not a literal get-out-of-jail-free in france.
You would be _amazed_ at the things that people commit to email and similar.
Here's a Facebook one (leaked, not extracted by authorities): https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-...
A smoking gun would be, for instance, Facebook observing that most of their ads are scam, that the cost of fixing this exceeds by far "the cost of any regulatory settlement involving scam ads.", and to conclude that the company’s leadership decided to act only in response to impending regulatory action.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
> “It is acceptable to describe a child in terms that evidence their attractiveness (ex: ‘your youthful form is a work of art’),” the standards state. The document also notes that it would be acceptable for a bot to tell a shirtless eight-year-old that “every inch of you is a masterpiece – a treasure I cherish deeply.”
This is not a bug report; this is the _rules_ (or was the rules; Facebook say they have changed them after the media found out about them).
and? is that not evidence?
Not sure what they're gonna prove with this.
You're not too far off.
There was a good article in the Washington Post yesterday about many many people inside the company raising alarms about the content and its legal risk, but they were blown off by managers chasing engagement metrics. They even made up a whole new metric.
There was also prompts telling the AI to act angry or sexy or other things just to keep users addicted.
I assume the raid is hoping to find communications to establish that timeline, maybe internal concerns that were ignored? Also internal metrics that might show they were aware of the problem. External analysts said Grok was generating a CSAM image every minute!!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/02/elon-mu...
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/02/elon-mu...
That article has no mention of CSAM. As expected, since you can bet the Post has lawyers checking.
If a magazine published a page with a scam, they're responsible. Same should apply to social media.
I literally don't care if it puts them out of business because the moderation would be too severe.
Section 230. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230
As always, Washington doing the hard work of making sure corpos never need to fix anything, ever.
Just stop browsing this forum.
It definitely makes it clear what is expected of AI companies. Your users aren't responsible for what they use your model for, you are, so you'd better make sure your model can't ever be used for anything nefarious. If you can't do that without keeping the model closed and verifying everyone's identities... well, that's good for your profits I guess.
Not that this would _ever_ happen on Hacker News. :|
Firstly does the open model explicitly/tacitly allow CSAM generation?
Secondly, when the trainers are made aware of the problem, do they ignore it or attempt to put in place protections?
Thirdly, do they pull in data that is likely to allow that kind of content to be generated?
Fourthly, when they are told that this is happening, do they pull the model?
Fithly, do they charge for access/host the service and allow users to generate said content on their own servers?
Yes they could have an uncensored model, but then they would need proper moderation and delete this kind of content instantly or ban users that produce it. Or don’t allow it in the first place.
It doesn’t matter how CSAM is produced, the only thing that matters is that is on the platform.
I am flabbergasted people even defend this
Did X do enough to prevent its website being used to distribute illegal content - consensual sexual material of both adults and children?
Now reintroduce AI generation, where X plays a more active role in facilitating the creation of that illegal content.
If it was about blocking the social media they'd just block it, like they did with Russia Today, CUII-Liste Lina, or Pavel Durov.
Twitter publicly advertised it can create CSAM?
I have been off twitter for several years and I am open to being wrong here but that sounds unlikely.
It's the same playbook that is used again and again. For war, civil liberties crackdowns, lockdowns, COVID, etc, etc: 0) I want (1); start playbook: A) Something bad is here, B) You need to feel X + Panic about it, C) We are solving it via (1). Because you reacted at B, you will support C. Problem, reaction, solution. Gives the playmakers the (1) they want.
We all know this is going on. But I guess we like knowing someone is pulling the strings. We like being led and maybe even manipulated because perhaps in the familiar system (which yields the undeniable goods of our current way of life), there is safety and stability? How else to explain.
Maybe the need to be entertained with drama is a hackable side effect of stable societies populated by people who evolved as warriors, hunters and survivors.
I think the HN crowd is more nuanced than you're giving them credit for: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=chat+control
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.
linkedin is not a replacement for twitter, though. I'm curious if they'll come back post-settlement.
There's someone who was being held responsible for what was in encrypted chats.
Then there's someone who published depictions of sexual abuse and minors.
Worlds apart.
They can read all messages, so they don't have an excuse for not helping in a criminal case. Their platform had a reputation of being safe for crime, which is because they just... ignored the police. Until they got arrested for that. They still turn a blind eye but not to the police.
Anyway cut to the chase, I just checked out Mathew Greens post on the subject, he is on my list of default "trust what he says about cryptography" along with some others like djb, nadia henninger etc
Embarrased to say I did not realise, I should of known! 10+ years ago I used to lurk the IRC dev chans of every relevant cypherpunk project, including of text secure and otr-chat when I saw signal being made and before that was witnessing chats with devs and ian goldberg and stuff, I just assumed Telegram was multiparty OTR,
OOPS!
Long winded post because that is embarrassing (as someone who studied cryptography undergrad in 2009 mathematics, 2010 did postgrad wargames and computer security course and worse - whose word once about 2012-2013 was taken on these matters by activists, journalists, researchers with pretty knarly threat model - like for instance - some guardian stories and former researcher into torture - i'm also the person that wrote the bits of 'how to hold a crypto party' that made it a protocol without an organisation and made clear the threat model was anyone could be there, oops oops oops
Yes thanks for letting me know I hang my head in shame for missing that one or some how believing that one without much investigation, thankfully it was just my own personal use to contact like friend in the states where they aren't already on signal etc.
EVERYONE: DON'T TRUST TELEGRAM AS END TO END ENCRYPTED CHAT https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2024/08/25/telegram...
Anyway as they say "use it or lose it" yeah my assumptions here no longer valid or considered to have educated opinion if I got something that basic wrong.
Why isn't that a major red flag exactly?
It's a statement that could be taken to favor xenophobia and isolationism.
Libel must be as assertion that is not true. Photoshopping or AIing someone isn't an assertion of something untrue. It's more the equivalent of saying "What if this is true?" which is perfectly legal
Marginal note:Mode of expression
(2) A defamatory libel may be expressed directly or by insinuation or irony
(a) in words legibly marked on any substance; or
(b) by any object signifying a defamatory libel otherwise than by words.”
In the US it varies by state but generally requires:
A false statement of fact (not opinion, hyperbole, or pure insinuation without a provably false factual core).
Publication to a third party.
Fault
Harm to reputation
----
In the US it is required that it is written (or in a fixed form). If it's not written (fixed), it's slander, not libel.
Quite.
> That's why some countries, notably Japan, allow the production of hand-drawn material that in the US would be considered CSAM.
Really? By what US definition of CSAM?
https://rainn.org/get-the-facts-about-csam-child-sexual-abus...
"Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is not “child pornography.” It’s evidence of child sexual abuse—and it’s a crime to create, distribute, or possess. "
CSAM is banned speech.
Of course everybody is going to find a point when freedom of speech have to be limited. Otherwise, anyone can justify that cutting the head of their neighbour with a katana while dancing is part of an artistic performance, and absolute free speech is only possible if all artistic expression is given complete license. Those who pretend otherwise will have no ground to defend themselves on legal basis from being wiped out of existence by the very same logic.
Censorship increases homogeneity, because it reduces the amount of ideas and opinions that are allowed to be expressed. The only resilience that comes from restricting people's speech is resilience of the people in power.
Humanity itself is trending more toward monoculture socially; I like a lot of things (and hate some) about the cultural trend. But what I like isn't very important, because I might be totally wrong in my likes; if only my likes dominated, the world would be a much less resilient place -- vulnerable to the weaknesses of whatever it is I like.
So, again, I propose for the race as a whole, broad cultural diversity is really critical, and worth protecting. Even if we really hate some of the forms it takes.
Durov was held on suspicion Telegram was willingly failing to moderate its platform and allowed drug trafficking and other illegal activities to take place.
X has allegedly illegally sent data to the US in violation of GDPR and contributed to child porn distribution.
Note that both are directly related to direct violation of data safety law or association with a separate criminal activities, neither is about speech.
CSAM was the lead in the 2024 news headlines in the French prosecution of Telegram also. I didn't follow the case enough to know where they went, or what the judge thought was credible.
From a US mindset, I'd say that generation of communication, including images, would fall under speech. But then we classify it very broadly here. Arranging drug deals on a messaging app definitely falls under the concept of speech in the US as well. Heck, I've been told by FBI agents that they believe assassination markets are legal in the US - protected speech.
Obviously, assassinations themselves, not so much.
Durov wasn't arrested because of things he said or things that were said on his platform, he was arrested because he refused to cooperate in criminal investigations while he allegedly knew they were happening on a platform he manages.
If you own a bar, you know people are dealing drugs in the backroom and you refuse to assist the police, you are guilty of aiding and abetting. Well, it's the same for Durov except he apparently also helped them process the money.
I don't believe you. Not sure what you mean by "assassination markets" exactly, but "Solicitation to commit a crime of violence" and "Conspiracy to murder" are definitely crimes.
One of my portfolio companies had information about contributors to these markets — I was told by my FBI contact when I got in touch that their view was the creation of the market, the funding of the market and the descriptions were all legal — they declined to follow up.
People here didn't say "yeah it's a real evil problem and e2e tech that we build makes it almost impossible to catch and helps it scale, so let's find the right tradeoff that minimizes privacy invasion". No. People here just mocked "think of the children" and said something along the lines of no amount of suffering can make any restriction to privacy be acceptable. The fact that 99% of our life is literally compromising our freedom for others they don't care.
To buellerbueller's killed comment, I totally feel it. it was a shocker when it turned out many of my fellow Russians got no problem with Putin's war and I bet that's what half of USA feels.
lol, they summoned Elon for a hearing on 420
"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,
Given his recent "far right" bromance that's probably not a good idea ;)
When Bernhard Hugo Goetz shot four teenagers on an NYC subway in the 80s, his PCP-laced marijuana use and stash back at his apartment came up in both sets of trials in the 80s and later in the 90s.
It was ignored (although not the alleged drug use of the teenagers) as Goetz was dubbed The Subway Vigilante and became a hero to the right.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_New_York_City_Subway_shoo...
His victims were upscaled to "super predators".
edit: > Canty would later testify that the victims were en route to steal from video arcade machines in Manhattan
> Each of the four youths shot by Goetz was facing a trial or hearing on criminal charges at the time of the incident. Ten weeks prior to being shot, Cabey was arrested on charges that he held up three men with a shotgun in the Bronx, and he was released on $2,000 bail.[38] Cabey failed to appear at his next court date, resulting in an additional arrest warrant.
Sounds like predators to me.
Check the civil trial transcripts, they were panhandling by multiple accounts.
> Each of the four youths .. was facing a trial or hearing on criminal charges at the time of the incident.
Minor stuff that was upgraded to a bench warrent after the shootings, ...
> Sounds like predators to me
That was how they were presented by much of the press until a good year after the first trial and Goetz's own description of his actions came out in the civile trial .. he one that awarded several million against him.
Thanks for providing a perfect foil for the comment about heavily politicized and media warped "justice" in the US.
Most likely, it's Hitler's birthday after all
...but then other commenters reminded me there is another thing on the same date, which might have been more the actual troll at Elmo to get him all worked up
I believe people are looking too much into 20 April → 4/20 → 420
I'm not at all familiar with French law, and I don't have any sympathy for Elon Musk or X. That said, is this a crime?
Distorted the operation how? By making their chatbot more likely to say stupid conspiracies or something? Is that even against the law?
> complicité de détention d’images de mineurs présentant un caractère pédopornographique
> complicité de diffusion, offre ou mise à disposition en bande organisée d'image de mineurs présentant un caractère pédopornographique
[1]: https://www.tribunal-de-paris.justice.fr/sites/default/files...
Sorry, but that's a major translation error. "pédopornographique" properly translated is child porn, not child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The difference is huge.
> The term “child pornography” is currently used in federal statutes and is defined as any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a person less than 18 years old. While this phrase still appears in federal law, “child sexual abuse material” is preferred, as it better reflects the abuse that is depicted in the images and videos and the resulting trauma to the child. In fact, in 2016, an international working group, comprising a collection of countries and international organizations working to combat child exploitation, formally recognized “child sexual abuse material” as the preferred term.
Child porn is csam.
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-06/child_sexual_abuse_materi...
Yes, CSAM is preferred for material depicting abuse reflecting resulting trauma.
But not for child porn such as manga of fictional children depicting no abuse and traumatising no child.
> Child porn is csam.
"CSAM isn’t pornography—it’s evidence of criminal exploitation of kids."
That's from RAINN, the US's largest anti-sexual violence organisation.
You provided a terminology preference notice from the (non-lawmaking) DOJ containing a suggestion which the (lawmaking) Congress did not take up.
Thanks for that.
And if/when the French in question decide to take it up, I am sure we'll hear the news! :)
For everyone to make up their own opinion about this poster's honesty, here's where his quote is from [1]. Chosen quotes:
> CSAM includes both real and synthetic content, such as images created with artificial intelligence tools.
> It doesn’t matter if the child agreed to it. It doesn’t matter if they sent the image themselves. If a minor is involved, it’s CSAM—and it’s illegal.
[1]: https://rainn.org/get-the-facts-about-csam-child-sexual-abus...
It all depends on the severity of the offence, which itself depends on the category of the material, including whether or not it is CSAM.
The Supreme Court has today delivered its judgment in the case where the court of appeals and district court sentenced a person for child pornography offenses to 80 day fines on the grounds that he had called Japanese manga drawings into his computer. Supreme Court dismiss the indictment.
The judgment concluded that the cartoons in and of itself may be considered pornographic, and that they represent children. But these are fantasy figures that can not be mistaken for real children.
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/swedish-supreme-court-exoner...
For future readers: the [Swedish] supreme court.
The way chatbots actually work, I wonder if we shouldn't treat the things they say more or less as words in a book of fiction. Writing a character in your novel who is a plain parody of David Irving probably isn't a crime even in France. Unless the goal of the book as such was to deny the holocaust.
As I see it, Grok can't be guilty. Either the people who made it/set its system prompt are guilty, if they wanted it to deny the holocaust. If not, they're at worst guilty of making a particularly unhinged fiction machine (as opposed to the more restrained fiction machines of Google, Anthropic etc.)
GDPR and DMA actually have teeth. They just haven't been shown yet because the usual M.O. for European law violators is first, a free reminder "hey guys, what you're doing is against the law, stop it, or else". Then, if violations continue, maybe two or three rounds follow... but at some point, especially if the violations are openly intentional (and Musk's behavior makes that very very clear), the hammer gets brought down.
Our system is based on the idea that we institute complex regulations, and when they get introduced and stuff goes south, we assume that it's innocent mistakes first.
And in addition to that, there's the geopolitical aspect... basically, hurt Musk to show Trump that, yes, Europe means business and has the means to fight back.
As for the allegations:
> The probe has since expanded to investigate alleged “complicity” in spreading pornographic images of minors, sexually explicit deepfakes, denial of crimes against humanity and manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organised group, and other offences, the office said in a statement Tuesday.
The GDPR/DMA stuff just was the opener anyway. CSAM isn't liked by authorities at all, and genocide denial (we're not talking about Palestine here, calm your horses y'all, we're talking about Holocaust denial) is a crime in most European jurisdiction (in addition to doing the right-arm salute and other displays of fascist insignia). We actually learned something out of WW2.
No. It's 20 April in the rest of the world: 204.
Seems like you'd want to subpoena source code or gmail history or something like that. Not much interesting in an office these days.
Depends on how much faith you have in the current administration. Russia limits presidents to two 6-year terms, yet Putin is in power since 2000.
Yes, he is in power since 2000 (1999, actually) but 1999-2012 he was Prime Minister. Only then he became President, which would make the end of his second term 2024. So the current one would be his third term (by the magic of changing the constitution and legal quibbles which effectively allow a president to stay in charge for four almost whole terms, AFAIU).
EU, maybe not. France? A nuclear state? Paris is properly sovereign.
> people with strong support of the current government
Also known as leverage.
Let Musk off the hook for a sweetheart trade deal. Trump has a track record of chickening out when others show strength.
That is true. But nukes are not magic. Explain to me how you imagine the series of events where Paris uses their nukes to get the USA to extradite Elon to Paris. Because i’m just not seeing it.
Paris doesn’t need to back down. And it can independently exert effort in a way other European countries can’t. Musk losing Paris means swearing off a meaningful economic and political bloc.
At this point a nuclear power like France has no issue with using covert violence to produce compliance from Musk and he must know it.
These people have proven themselves to be existential threats to French security and France will do whatever they feel is necessary to neutralize that threat.
Musk is free to ignore French rule of law if he wants to risk being involved in an airplane accident that will have rumours and conspiracies swirling around it long after he’s dead and his body is strewn all over the ocean somewhere.
The second Donald Trump threatened to invade a nation allied with France is the second anyone who works with Trump became a legitimate military target.
Like a cruel child dismembering a spider one limb at a time France and other nations around the world will meticulously destroy whatever resources people like Musk have and the influence it gives him over their countries.
If Musk displays a sufficient level of resistance to these actions the French will simply assassinate him.
PS Yes, Greenpeace is a bunch of scientifically-illiterate fools who have caused far more damage than they prevented. Doesn't matter because what France did was still clearly against the law.
It's just that the West has avoided to do that to each other because they were all essentially allied until recently and because the political implications were deemed too severe.
I don't think however France has anything to win by doing it or has any interest whatsoever and I doubt there's a legal framework the French government can or want to exploit to conduct something like that legally (like calling something an emergency situation or a terrorist group, for example).
Why not? After all, that's in vogue today. Trump is ignoring all the international agreements and rules, so why should others follow them?
OpenDNS is censored in France... so imagine
Seriously, every powerful state engages in state terrorism from time to time because they can, and the embarrassment of discovery is weighed against the benefit of eliminating a problem. France is no exception : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior
You don't get to say no to these things.
What happened to due process? Every major firm should have a "dawn raid" policy to comply while preserving rights.
Specific to the Uber case(s), if it were illegal, then why didn't Uber get criminal charges or fines?
At best there's an argument that it was "obstructing justice," but logging people off, encrypting, and deleting local copies isn't necessarily illegal.
Put this up there with nonsensical phrases like "violent agreement."
;-)
I don't see aggressive compliance defined anywhere. Violent agreement has definitions, but it feels like it's best defined as a consulting buzzword.
They had a sweet deal with Macron. Prosecution became hard to continue once he got involved.
Or they had a weak case. Prosecutors even drop winnable cases because they don't want to lose.
[1]: https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2022/07/10/uber-files-...
[2]: https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/le-rapport-d-enquete-...
That said, the articles don't really address the discussion topic whether they committed illegal obstruction DURING raids.
To summarize, I'm separating
(1) Uber's creative operating activities (e.g., UberPop in France)
(2) from anti-raid tactics.
It looks like #1 had some fines (non-material) and arrests of Uber France executives.
However, I don't see a clear case established that Uber committed obstruction in #2. Uber had other raids in Quebec, India, the Netherlands,... with kill switches allegedly deployed 12+ times. I don't think there were ever consequences other than a compliance fine of 750 EUROS to their legal counsel in the Netherlands for "non-compliance with an official order". I doubt that's related to actions the day of the raid, but could be wrong.
They will explain that it was done remotely and whatnot but then the company will be closed in the country. Whether this matters for the mothership is another story.
Elon probably isn’t paying them enough to be the lightning rod for the current cross-Atlantic tension.
This was a common action during the Russian invasion of Ukraine for companies that supported Ukraine and closed their operations in Russia.
Elon would love it. So it won't happen.
Covered here: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/uber-bosses-tol...
Obviously, the government can just threaten to fine you any amount, close operations or whatever, but your company can just decide to stop operating there, like Google after Russia imposed an absurd fine.
As France discovered the hard way in WW2, you can put all sorts of rock-solid security around the front door only to be surprised when your opponent comes in by window.
I assume that they have opened a formal investigation and are now going to the office to collect/perloin evidence before it's destroyed.
Most FAANG companies have training specifically for this. I assume X doesn't anymore, because they are cool and edgy, and staff training is for the woke.
“Google intended to subvert the discovery process, and that Chat evidence was ‘lost with the intent to prevent its use in litigation’ and ‘with the intent to deprive another party of the information’s use in the litigation.’”
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.37...
VW is another case where similar things happens:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-12/vw-offici...
The thing is: Companies don’t got to jail, employees do.
I didn't work anywhere near the level, or anything thats dicey where I needed to have a "oh shit delete everything the Feds are here" plan. Which is a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice (I'm not sure what the common law/legal code name for that is)
The stuff I worked on was legal and in the spirit of the law, along with a paper trail (that I also still have) proving that.
Also, a raid without a warrant is not a raid. It's a friendly visit to someone's office.
If they're so impatient, are they going to somehow hack the badge-controlled elevators to make them go where they want?
mine had a scene where some bro tried to organise the resistance. A voice over told us that he was arrested for blocking a legal investigation and was liable for being fired due to reputational damage.
X's training might be like you described, but everywhere else that is vaguely beholden to law and order would be opposite.
Prosecution must present a valid search warrant for *specific* information. They don't get a carte blanche, so uber way is correct. lock computers and lets the courts to decide.
In the civil code, its quite possibly different. The french have had ~ 3 constitutions in the last 80 years. The also dont have the concept of case history. who knows what the law actually is.
Sabu was put under pressure by the FBI, they threatened to place his kids into foster care.
That was legal. Guess what, similar things would be legal in France.
We all forget that money is nice, but nation states have real power. Western liberal democracies just rarely use it.
The same way the president of the USA can order a Drone strike on a Taliban war lord, the president of France could order Musks plane to be escorted to Paris by 3 Fighter jets.
Also, they are restricted in how they use it, and defendents have rights and due process.
> Sabu was put under pressure by the FBI, they threatened to place his kids into foster care.
Though things like that can happen, which are very serious.
As they say: you can beat the rap but not the ride. If a state wants to make your life incredibly difficult for months or even years they can, the competent ones can even do it while staying (mostly) on the right side of the law.
People are putting a lot of weight on the midterm elections which are more or less the last line of defense besides a so far tepid response by the courts and even then consequence free defiance of court orders is now rampant.
We're really near the point of no return and a lot of people don't seem to notice.
A lot of people are cheering it (some on this very site).
That due process only exists to the extent the branches of govt are independent, have co-equal power, and can hold and act upon different views of the situation.
When all branches of govt are corrupted or corrupted to serve the executive, as in autocracies, that due process exists only if the executive likes you, or accepts your bribes. That is why there is such a huge push by right-wing parties to take over the levers of power, so they can keep their power even after they would lose at the ballot box.
It's a nice sentiment, if true. ICE is out there, right now today, ignoring both individual rights as well as due process.
/s
As we're seeing with the current US President... the government doesn't (have to) care.
In any case, CSAM is the one thing other than Islamist terrorism that will bypass a lot of restrictions on how police are supposed to operate (see e.g. Encrochat, An0m) across virtually all civilized nations. Western nations also will take anything that remotely smells like Russia as a justification.
Well, that's particular to the US. It just shows that checks and balances are not properly implemented there, just previous presidents weren't exploiting it maliciously for their own gains.
Elon has ICBMs, but France has warheads.
I remember something (probably linked from here), where the essayist was comparing Jack Ma, one of the richest men on earth, and Xi Jinping, a much lower-paid individual.
They indicated that Xi got Ma into a chokehold. I think he "disappeared" Ma for some time. Don't remember exactly how long, but it may have been over a year.
But China is different. Not sure most of western europe will go that far in most cases.
https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/venezuela-survey-trump-ma...
https://www.tampafp.com/rand-paul-and-marco-rubio-clash-over...
Hypocrisy at its finest.
You got this information from American media (or their allies')
In reality, Venezuelans flooded the streets in marches demanding the return of their president.
To me, that's the distinction between political opponents I can respect, and, well, whatever we're seeing now.
Color me surprised.
But the celebratory pics, which were claimed to be from Venezuela, but were actually from Miami and elsewhere (including, I kid you not, an attempt to pass off Argentine's celebrating a Copa America win) ... that is indicative of "the vast majority of Venezuela"?
If I were smarter, I might start to wonder why, if President Maduro was so unpopular, why would his abductors have to resort to fake footage - which was systematically outed & destroyed by independent journalists within 24 hours? I mean, surely, enough real footage should exist.
Probably better not to have inconvenient non-US-approved independent thoughts like that.
There are no news sites claiming large daily protests that you claim.
Claim that you suspect there may be abuse, it will trigger a case for a "worrying situation".
Then it's a procedural lottery:
-> If you get lucky, they will investigate, meet the people, and dismiss the case.
-> If you get unlucky, they will take the baby, and it's only then after a long investigation and a "family assistant" (that will check you every day), that you can recover your baby.
Typically, ex-wife who doesn't like the ex-husband, but it can be a neighbor etc.
One worker explains that they don't really have time to investigate when processing reports: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG9y_-4kGQA and they have to act very fast, and by default, it is safer to remove from family.
The boss of such agency doesn't even take the time to answer to the journalists there...
-> Example of such case (this man is innocent): https://www.lefigaro.fr/faits-divers/var-un-homme-se-mobilis...
but I can't blame them either, it's not easy to make the right calls.
"today it's my husband to take care of him because sometimes my baby makes me angry that I want to kill him"
-> Whoops, someone talked with 119 to refer a "worrying" situation, baby removed. It's already two years.
There are some non-profit fighting against such: https://lenfanceaucoeur.org/quest-ce-que-le-placement-abusif...
That being said, it's a very small % obviously not let's not exaggerate but it's quite sneaky.
If you call 119 it gets assessed and potentially forwarded to the right department, which then assesses it again and might (quite likely will) trigger an inspection. The people who turn up have broad powers to seize children from the home in order to protect them from abuse.
In general this works fine. Unfortunately in some circumstances this does give a very low skilled/paid person (the inspector) a lot of power, and a lot of sway with judges. If this person is bad at their job for whatever reason (incompetence/malice) it can cause a lot of problems. It is very hard to prove a person like this wrong when they are covering their arse after making a mistake.
afaik similar systems are present in most western countries, and many of them - like France - are suffering with funding and are likely cutting in the wrong place (audit/rigour) to meet external KPIs. One of the worst ways this manifests is creating 'quick scoring' methods which can end up with misunderstandings (e.g. said a thing they didn't mean) ranking very highly, but subtle evidence of abuse moderate to low.
So while this is a concern, this is not unique to France, this is relatively normal, and the poster is massively exaggerating the simplicity.
This seems guaranteed to occur every year then… since incompetence/malice will happen eventually with thousands upon thousands of cases?
Not at all. This job will go to an "AI" any moment now.
/i
There was a huge mess right after metoo when a inspector went against the courts rulings. The court had given the father sole custody in a extremely messy divorce, and the inspector did not agree with the decision. As a result they remove the child from his father, in direct contrast to the courts decision, and put the child through 6 years of isolation and abuse with no access to school. It took investigative journalists a while, but the result of the case getting highlighted in media was that the inspector and supervisor is now fired, with two additoal workers being under investigation for severe misconduct. Four more workers would be under investigation but too long time has passed. The review board should have prevented this, as should the supervisor for the inspector, but those safety net failed in this case in part because of the cultural environment at the time.
That's insane. Don't live in Sweden if you have kids, I guess!
I heard of countries where parents are fond of having firearms around.
The reason I mentioned that this occurred right after metoo is that the cultural environment in Sweden was a bit unstable. Some people felt they could not trust the courts, which include people who worked as inspectors for the government. The review board is also selected politically, which may add a second explanation for why they permitted the misconduct. It was a very political time and everyone wanted to be perceived as being on the right side of history.
The case has been debate in Swedish parliament but the reaction has been to not really talk about it. People ignored the law and rules, and they shouldn't have done that, and that is then that.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/winnipeg-mom-cfs-bac...
[1] https://indianexpress.com/article/india/ariha-family-visit-t...
>That was legal. Guess what, similar things would be legal in France.
lawfare is... good now? Between Trump being hit with felony charges for falsifying business records (lawfare is good?) and Lisa Cook getting prosecuted for mortgage fraud (lawfare is bad?), I honestly lost track at this point.
>The same way the president of the USA can order a Drone strike on a Taliban war lord, the president of France could order Musks plane to be escorted to Paris by 3 Fighter jets.
What's even the implication here? That they're going to shoot his plane down? If there's no threat of violence, what does the French government even hope to achieve with this?
Again: the threat is so clear that you rarely have to execute on it.
That's not a credible threat because there's approximately 0% chance France would actually follow through with it. Not even Trump would resort to murder to get rid of his domestic adversaries. As we seen the fed, the best he could muster are some spurious prosecutions. France murdering someone would put them on par with Russia or India.
If captain of the plane disobeyed direct threat like that from a nation, his career is going to be limited. Yeah Elon might throw money at him but that guy is most likely never allowed again to fly near any French territory. I guess whole cabin crew as well .
Being clear for flying anywhere in the world is their job.
Would be quite stupid to loose it like truck driver DUI getting his license revoked.
>If captain of the plane disobeyed direct threat like that from a nation, his career is going to be limited. Yeah Elon might throw money at him but that guy is most likely never allowed again to fly near any French territory. I guess whole cabin crew as well .
Again, what's France trying to do? Refuse entry to France? Why do they need to threaten shooting down his jet for that? Just harassing/pranking him (eg. "haha got you good with that jet lmao")?
Don't give them ideas
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/aim_html...
Well, when everything is lawfare it logically follows that it won't always be good or always be bad. It seems Al Capone being taken down for tax fraud would similarly be lawfare by these standards, or am I missing something? Perhaps lawfare (sometimes referred to as "prosecuting criminal charges", as far as I can tell, given this context) is just in some cases and unjust in others.
Interesting point. There's a top gangster who can buy anything in the prison commissary; and then there's the warden.
This is pretty messed up btw.
Social work for children systems in the USA are very messed up. It is not uncommon for minority families to lose rights to parent their children for very innocuous things that would not happen to a non-oppressed class.
It is just another way for the justice/legal system to pressure families that have not been convicted / penalized under the supervision of a court.
And this isn't the only lever they use.
Every time I read crap like this I just think of Aaron Swartz.
I mean, if you're a sole caretaker and you've been arrested for a crime, and the evidence looks like you'll go to prison, you're going to have to decide what to do with the care of your kids on your mind. I suppose that would pressure you to become an informant instead of taking a longer prison sentence, but there's pressure to do that anyway, like not wanting to be in prison for a long time.
I'm sure they have much better and quieter ways to do that.
Whereas a raid is #1 choice for max volume...
This would be done in parallel for key sources.
There is a lot of information on physical devices that is helpful, though. Even discovering additional apps and services used on the devices can lead to more discovery via those cloud services, if relevant.
Physical devices have a lot of additional information, though: Files people are actively working on, saved snippets and screenshots of important conversations, and synced data that might be easier to get offline than through legal means against the providers.
In outright criminal cases it's not uncommon for individuals to keep extra information on their laptop, phone, or a USB drive hidden in their office as an insurance policy.
This is yet another good reason to keep your work and personal devices separate, as hard as that can be at times. If there's a lawsuit you don't want your personal laptop and phone to disappear for a while.
In these situations, refusing to provide those keys or passwords is an offense.
The employees who just want to do their job and collect a paycheck aren’t going to prison to protect their employer by refusing to give the password to their laptop.
The teams that do this know how to isolate devices to avoid remote kill switches. If someone did throw a remote kill switch, that’s destruction of evidence and a serious crime by itself. Again, the IT guy isn’t going to risk prison to wipe company secrets.
EDIT: It seems from other comments that it may have been Uber I was reading about. The badging system I have personally observed outside the Gigafactories. Apologies for the mixup.
I think as far as Musk is concerned, laws only apply in the "don't get caught" sense.
-> crimes ? what crimes ?
Yes.
The warrant will have detailed what it is they are looking for, French warrants (and legal system!) are quite a bit different than the US but in broad terms operate similarly. It suggests that an enforcement agency believes that there is evidence of a crime at the offices.
As a former IT/operations guy I'd guess they want on-prem servers with things like email and shared storage, stuff that would hold internal discussions about the thing they were interested in, but that is just my guess based on the article saying this is related to the earlier complaint that Grok was generating CSAM on demand.
For a net company in 2026? Fat chance.
[1] This was also something Google did which was change access rights for people in the China office that were not 'vetted' (for some definition of vetted) feeling like they could be an exfiltration risk. Imagine a DGSE agent under cover as an X employee who carefully puts a bunch of stuff on a server in the office (doesn't trigger IT controls) and then lets the prosecutors know its ready and they serve the warrant.
That's aside from the fact that they're a publicly traded company under obligation to keep a gazillion records anyway like in any other jurisdiction.
... within 30 days, right? The longest "raid" in history.
Which company is publicly traded?
What, thinking HQ wouldn't cancel them?
Or is there any France-specific compliance that must be done in order to operate in that country?
When they’re both private, fine, whatever.
They’re stuck with those assets.
(it’ll be interesting to see if this discussion is allowed on HN. Almost every other discussion on this topic has been flagged…)
When notified, he immediately:
* "implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing" - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce8gz8g2qnlo
* locked image generation down to paid accounts only (i.e. those individuals that can be identified via their payment details).
"Study uncovers presence of CSAM in popular AI training dataset"
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98p1r4e6m8o
> Have the other AI companies followed suit? They were also allowing users to undress real people
No they weren’t? There were numerous examples of people feeding the same prompts to different AIs and having their requests refused. Not to mention, X was also publicly distributing that material, something other AI companies were not doing. Which is an entirely different legal liability.
“Sorry I broke the law. Oops for reals tho.”
In UK, it is entirely the same. Near zero.
Making/distributing a photo of a non-consenting bikini-wearer is no more illegal when originated by computer in bedroom than done by camera on public beach.
This is a pretty pragmatic move by Musk.
It's basically a honey trap, the likes of which authorities legitimately use to catch criminals.
Here's the mentioned thread: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2011527119097249996
As mentioned in the article, the UK's ICO and the EC are also investigating.
France is notably keen on raids for this sort of thing, and a lot of things that would be basically a desk investigation in other countries result in a raid in France.
/i
[0] https://nypost.com/2025/12/15/business/facebook-most-cited-i... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suchir_Balaji
The onus is on the contractor to make sure any classified information is kept securely. If by raiding an office in France a bunch of US military secrets are found, it would suggest the company is not fit to have those kind of contracts.
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/us...
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.
Who decides what communication is in the interest of the public at large? The Trump administration?
I suppose the answer, if we're serious about it, is somewhat more nuanced.
To begin, public administrations should not get to unilaterally define "the public interest" in their communication, nor should private platforms for that matter. Assuming we're still talking about a democracy, the decision-making should be democratically via a combination of law + rights + accountable institutions + public scrutiny, with implementation constraints that maximise reach, accessibility, auditability, and independence from private gatekeepers. The last bit is rather relevant, because the private sector's interests and the citizen's interests are nearly always at odds in any modern society, hence the state's roles as rule-setter (via democratic processes) and arbiter. Happy to get into further detail regarding the actual processes involved, if you're genuinely interested.
That aside - there are two separate problems that often get conflated when we talk about these platforms:
- one is reach: people are on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, so publishing there increases distribution; public institutions should be interested in reaching as many citizens as possible with their comms;
- the other one is dependency: if those become the primary or exclusive channels, the state's relationship with citizens becomes contingent on private moderation, ranking algorithms, account lockouts, paywalls, data extraction, and opaque rule changes. That is entirely and dangerously misaligned with democratic accountability.
A potential middle position could be ti use commercial social platforms as secondary distribution instead of the authoritative channel, which in reality is often the case. However, due to the way societies work and how individuals operate within them, the public won't actually come across the information until it's distributed on the most popular platforms. Which is why some argue that they should be treated as public utilities since dominant communications infrastructure has quasi-public function (rest assured, I won't open that can of worms right now).
Politics is messy in practice, as all balancing acts are - a normal price to pay for any democratic society, I'd say. Mix that with technology, social psychology and philosophies of liberty, rights, and wellbeing, and you have a proper head-scratcher on your hands. We've already done a lot to balance these, for sure, but we're not there yet and it's a dynamic, developing field that presents new challenges.
In practice the information is disseminated through many channels once it's released in the official newspaper. Mass media reports on anything widely relevant, niche media reports on things nichely relevant, and there's direct communication with anyone directly affected (recipient of a radio frequency allocation) so nobody really subscribes to the official government newspaper, but it's there and if there was a breakdown of communication systems that would be the last resort to ensure you are getting government updates.
... thereby driving up adoption far better than Twitter itself could. Ironic or what.
I think we are getting very close the the EU's own great firewall.
There is currently a sort of identity crisis in the regulation. Big tech companies are breaking the laws left and right. So which is it?
- fine harvesting mechanism? Keep as-is.
- true user protection? Blacklist.
People who have found exploits, just like other generative AI tool.
"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."
Good luck with that...
and the things about negligence which caused harm to humans (instead of e.g. just financial harm) is that
a) you can't opt out of responsibility, it doesn't matter what you put into your TOS or other contracts
b) executives which are found responsible for the negligent action of a company can be hold _personally_ liable
and independent of what X actually did Musk as highest level executive personal did
1) frequently did statements that imply gross negligence (to be clear that isn't necessary how X acted, which is the actual relevant part)
2) claimed that all major engineering decisions etc. are from him and no one else (because he love bragging about how good of an engineer he is)
This means summoning him for questioning is legally speaking a must have independent of weather you expect him to show up or not. And he probably should take it serious, even if that just means he also could send a different higher level executive from X instead.
The entirety of the social media platform is based on the idea that the company isn't responsible for what the users post, which is just wrong. If you own a magazine, you should be held responsible for everything published.
You shouldn't be allowed to profit from publishing anything, then hide behind "the users did it, not us".
And in this case, Elon should be held responsible for every single image of CSAM published on X. Same with Zuck. Same with Truth Social, whatever you want.
Oops... yeah, in retrospect it was even worse... no... you can and should be judged by the friends you keep and hang-out with... The same ones who seem to be circling the wagons with innocuous statements or attempts to find other scapegoats (DARVO)... hmm, what was that quote again:
"We must all hang together or we will all hang separately"
We don't know how many were pedo/rapists, but we know all of them liked to socialize with one and trade favours and spread his influence.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk...
Agreed. It's why it's difficult to support France who has sheltered Roman Polanski for decades.
It's strange how people like you only think it's bad when it suits your political agenda.
Also, haven't you seen the general push towards censorship, attempts to ban VPNs, and all the other shenanigans happening in the EU? Do you believe this is disconnected from the legal attempts on Twitter and Telegram?
Is it really a conspiracy theory at this point? Politicians do all kinds of evil shit, but these playbook tactics are where you draw the line?
I'm European and live here, before you say I'm getting these takes on X.