When the Paris prosecutor opened its criminal investigation of X in July 2025, it said the two complaints behind it alleged the platform’s algorithm was used for foreign interference. Seven months later, it raided X’s Paris office and summoned Elon Musk. The July 11, 2025 communiqué, signed by Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor, said that on January 12, 2025, the cybercrime section of her office had received two complaints, one from a federal deputy and one from a senior official of a French public institution, and that “these complaints reported the supposed use of the X (ex-Twitter) algorithm for purposes of foreign interference.” Media around the world ran headlines like the one used by Le Monde: “France probes X over foreign interference, as investigation closes in on Musk.” On the day of the raid, journalists described the case as an inquiry into “whether X allowed foreign powers to manipulate its algorithm.”
But the member of France’s National Assembly, its parliament, who filed the first complaint, Deputy Éric Bothorel, told Public that he was targeting Musk’s speech and X’s algorithm, not foreign interference. Bothorel shared his January 2025 letter. “I was not speaking in my complaint to the prosecutors of foreign interference,” he wrote in French, “but of deliberate interventions by the owner or any other person at X, ex-Twitter, that seemed to alter the original functioning of the algorithm.” He explained that at the end of 2024 he and other longtime users noticed that the posts rising in their feeds “seemed more and more politically oriented, all going in one particular direction.”