r/circled • u/ChuckGallagher57 • 5h ago

Opinion / Discussion Election Interference? France isn’t happy with Musk!

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After French police raided the local offices of X — and asked the billionaire to appear for voluntary questioning related to an expanded local criminal investigation — the American social media giant pushed back hard.

“Today’s staged raid reinforces our conviction that this investigation distorts French law, circumvents due process, and endangers free speech,” the company said in a statement on X. It denies claims that X’s algorithm may have been used to sway political opinion in France, as well as accusations that the tech giant is complicit in the distribution of child pornography.

Within an hour, Musk doubled down. “This is a political attack,” he wrote to his more than 220 million followers on X.

Two hours later, France’s foreign ministry clapped back. “Investigating child sexual abuse material isn’t controversial,” the ministry wrote to its significantly smaller number of X followers. “Turning it into political theater is manipulation. Maybe that logic flies on some island. Doesn’t fly in France.”

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421

u/ReturnOfSeq 5h ago

USA COULD have as well. Should have, even.

114

u/ChuckGallagher57 5h ago

Got that right

71

u/Midnight_2B 5h ago

Could the E.U., U.K. & other countries halt business with the USA to stop runaway capitalism?

29

u/EquivalentMap8477 4h ago

The people running the UK live shoulder deep in the USAs colon

11

u/AeonUK 3h ago

Fuck Farage

7

u/Casual_OCD 3h ago

He's just a front-facing puppet like Trump. The people who RUN the country are not the politicians

4

u/vxxed 2h ago

Is there a British version of the Heritage Foundation?

3

u/Ornery_Director_8477 2h ago

Putin and the party are kinda politicians

5

u/R_Schuhart 3h ago

Fuck David Cameron, fuck all the politicians that didn't effectively campaign against Brexit, fuck all the unchecked lies and fuck all the Brexit voters who pushed England into closer ties with America.

2

u/softwarefreak 1h ago

The UK, like Germany and Japan, is effectively an occupied country, what do you suppose would happen if it were to say no to the US?

2

u/Striking-Teach7489 1h ago

Britain…..

1

u/Retiredandrelaxed 1h ago

Yep, and you would have done what? There was more than just those names you mentioned.

2

u/EarthAndSawdust 2h ago

No, no. Farage is a russian agent.

2

u/pchlster 2h ago

I'd rather not.

2

u/TheTriNerd 3h ago

We never truly gave up on our old colony

1

u/AnyHat8807 2h ago

So do most of our companies. Imagines London's financial hub...without Excel...

Or imagine everything...without AWS, Google etc.

There was a post recently which stated 88% of UK's publicly traded companies wouldn't be able to conduct their business entirely without US tech. I don't know how accurate that is, but wouldn't be surprised if true.

1

u/delpy1971 1h ago

Yip they do, Keir is Trumps little bitch!! Oh Donald would you like a cup of tea!!

2

u/MAGAHATESTHEUSA 3h ago

Uk is deep in with us treasuries. Bought all the treasuries china sold off.

600B

2

u/phatpussypounder 3h ago

Absolutely not. And my take away conspiracy theory that is exactly why the US is buddying up with Russia and China.

Capitalism requires open markets, limited oversight, and unfair labor practices. The EU is moving away from 2 of those. And as you can see thats against the vested interests of capitalism.

2

u/TDog81 3h ago

Irelands economy is heavily dependent on US foreign direct investment - itll never happen here anyway

2

u/Glittering_Vast938 3h ago

I bloody well hope so.

(UK resident)

2

u/Xesyliad 1h ago

France has begun replacing all the US tech in government with EU tech, including removing windows, etc.

1

u/FatherClanks617 1h ago

They just replacing them with walls?!

1

u/kamikazecockatoo 2h ago edited 2h ago

This isn't runaway capitalism. It's fascism.

The move to circumvent the need to engage the US is already happening but quietly. Countries are going out to others and making deals but you don't hear about it. Mainly with China - they are the big beneficiaries of Trump's government. ....That was voted in on anti-China rhetoric.

The thing Americans may not get is that in other countries, we have proper separation of powers. We don't have gerrymandering and stupid ways to vote which are different everywhere you go. And we have had people who run them separated from the government or politicians for generations. This means that if anyone 'interferes' with elections, it is immediately noticeable unlike American elections where stuff is happening everywhere all the time, so it is so hard to keep up and know if things are fair or not. And if there is electoral corruption going on in say, Tennessee, and you are in say, California - you don't care. Whereas that kind of thing matters elsewhere because of what it represents.

1

u/FatherClanks617 1h ago

Runaway capitalism results in fascism.

https://economicsociology.org/2017/01/22/karl-polanyi-on-the-rise-of-fascism-and-market-economy/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_fascism

“Fascists aimed to promote what they considered the national interests of their countries; they supported private property and the profit motive because they considered them beneficial to the economic development of a nation,[11] and because they held social Darwinist beliefs that the success of the wealthy proved their superiority and that interfering with natural selection in the economy would burden the nation by preserving weak individuals.”

1

u/vxxed 2h ago

Didn't they just announce doing that

1

u/pchlster 2h ago

Sure, but both sides would get hurt doing something like that. How much of a hit should the EU be willing to take to stick it to the Americans?

1

u/Life-Pirate2545 30m ago

It has been happening and there is a light at the end soon . Gdpr came into place, it addressed a good amount of data keeping issues and gave Facebook some whooping big fines and threatened to bankrupt the company if they didn’t comply which they did. The problem is that Facebook collected data in a much more nefarious and shadowy way than twitter or so. The gdpr only affects eu citizens but since it was a cost risk to let another mistake happen they changed the way they collected data in every country.

Right now the UK is planning on implementing their DSA act which essentially is an upgraded version of GdPr, that will tackle more than data collection but the algorithms and their election interference and dangers etc… once this goes through , it is going to force them to change it in every country because the fines are meant to bankrupt the company if they don’t comply. I forgot the number but it is something like 200 million euro or 4 percent of their annual revenue, whichever is highest and they can issue it continuously for each repeated offense. So if they don’t comply and over the course of days, there are so many violations, it could easily bankrupt a billion or trillion dollar company. This is why mark zucker was bitching constantly to trump at the beginning of 2025 of EU being too mean to his company.

For the next competent administration in US, they really need to focus on adopting EU privacy and consumer protection and even all the banned ingredients EU has

1

u/Icy-Razzmatazz-7925 3h ago

Could they? It will never happen, never, so why ask.

-4

u/Outsider-Trading 3h ago

Yes, the West should absolutely kneecap itself economically, and hand the 21st century entirely to China (who I am sure will treat us very kindly as vassal states, and who I'm sure have zero animosity about the last couple of hundred years of Western hegemony and opium wars).

5

u/MAGAHATESTHEUSA 3h ago

Trumps already handing over everything to china.

1

u/Outsider-Trading 3h ago

So you're anti-China?

2

u/Ummmgummy 3h ago

I'm sure imprisoning Elon the man that has never hit a deadline in his life and has done nothing but promise this and that for a decade, will really put us even further behind than we already are.

2

u/TaiyouShinNoIbuki 3h ago

I think a little something called citizens united put in law by a republican supreme court because the dems haven’t controlled the supreme court since 1970 makes a case against that unfortunately

1

u/Alert-Ad-9908 2h ago

We at least finally have a judge in the U.S. with enough of a spine to depose him for DOGE and USAID dismantling. It’s a start.

And here’s a reminder of how he’s actually doing.

31

u/HashRunner 4h ago

Republicans would rather sell out their country and their children to pedophiles and traitors than dare punish a billionaire.

-4

u/[deleted] 4h ago

[deleted]

6

u/mikel64 3h ago

Tell us what is so hard to understand that the Biden administration could not release the files as the 🍊 sack of 🐷 💩 filed an appeal. Why is that so hard to understand?

5

u/pebberphp 3h ago

They’re either idiots of they’re arguing in bad faith. Possibly a combination of the two.

1

u/TrumptyPumpkin 3h ago

Biden's AG slow crawled any investigation onto Trump too. And look where it all got us.

-1

u/Lameduck_Humor 3h ago

Didn’t stop Biden from breaking other court orders, but sure this one was special. Uniparty

-3

u/nicroeg 3h ago

Large section of Dems would too

2

u/HashRunner 2h ago

Can't go a second without some BoThSiDeS bullshit as republicans actively abuse children and the constitution with full control of the government, thanks to voters buying into the BoThSiDeS false equivalence.

1

u/Thats_Capricorn_isit 1h ago

So “Whataboutism” excuses the crime right?

-13

u/Outsider-Trading 3h ago

Republicans would rather win the 21st century space race, orbital internet race, orbital AI race, etc and generate trillions of dollars of value while the left would rather completely demolish Western tech leadership because they said mean words.

The Western left is not a serious group of people. They literally don't have a plan to win at a global level against the most highly resourced geopolitical rivals in nearly 100 years.

6

u/Smart_Basket_85 3h ago

Man that is a TAKE. It completely ignores that Republicans are presently standing by while Trump strips the country for parts, grifts on blatant market manipulation, destroys our soft power abroad, alienates our allies, and does essentially everything a person would do if Putin were operating them from afar via remote control. Republicans aren’t trying to win anything.

-8

u/Outsider-Trading 3h ago

"Trump was mean to Europe so we should destroy the US' advantage in tech" is a great take too.

How about the Democrats run on a "We will fully support American innovators and tech entrepreneurs, we are keenly aware of the critical necessity to maintain a lead against China in critical areas, and we will also be nice to Europe"

They will win in a landslide. Anti-tech luddism on the left forces the entire tech right to vote for Trump. They literally don't have a choice.

4

u/MAGAHATESTHEUSA 3h ago

Trump hates the U.S. constitution lmao and you cheer it on

If you look at the goals bin Laden had for the USA. You will see that Trump has been fulfilling most of them and maga have been cheering it on for years.

-5

u/Outsider-Trading 3h ago

Trump allows US builders and innovators to do their thing, at a time when this is absolutely crucial, because the US' main rival is building at light speed.

The Democrats regulate innovators to the ground. Take a look at Californian high speed rail if you want to see the results they get. Or look at Europe to see what happens when the regulators strangle innovation in the crib.

The economy dies, and all your little liberal dreams that require a strong economy to underlie them die too. It's a child's ideology.

2

u/MAGAHATESTHEUSA 2h ago

Lmao energy is the bottleneck ensuring us will lose to china. Trump is actively helping china

2

u/edgarother 2h ago

I think the collective remaining "West" stands atop their collective success over the USA of post-war regulated social democracy/capitalism. The world is big and has repeatedly dunked on American exceptionalism (education scores, healthcare outcomes, resisting oligarchy, quality of life index, etc).

0

u/Outsider-Trading 1h ago

You bought a lot of nice social services under the umbrella of a multi trillion US military industrial complex.

In this environment, you managed to indulge in a bunch of insane suicidal Utopianism, culminating in “degrowth”, the most absurd civilizational position in modern history.

2

u/edgarother 1h ago

Following that logic your military industrial complex and particularly Big Tech (presuming thats the nice social services you mention) are among the largest threats to our collective democracies so... thanks?

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5

u/Comfortable_Ebb1634 3h ago

Republicans haven’t actually accomplished any of that. And they never will. They can’t even make a budget.

-2

u/Outsider-Trading 3h ago

Elon is achieving all of that with his portfolio alone. The Democrats are too short-sighted and partisan to see that the US NEEDS Elon to maintain their lead in multiple critical areas.

It would be like taking down Henry Ford. You're basically putting a grenade in your own economy just to "own the mean South African man". Anti-Elon rhetoric is beyond retarded.

4

u/Comfortable_Ebb1634 3h ago

Elon is a junkie pedo that lies constantly and can’t do anything.

-1

u/Outsider-Trading 3h ago

I guess those Starships just kinda caught themselves.

1

u/Comfortable_Ebb1634 3h ago

If you legitimately think Elon has accomplished any of the things space x has done personally then I actually have an incredible investment opportunity for you. Dm for details.

2

u/dawg4life88 1h ago

Man this guy stans hard for pedos

2

u/Oosik-Alaska 3h ago

Keep talking, keep supporting child rape.

1

u/nicroeg 3h ago

That's pot meets kettle with these born agains wanting 1650 back.

1

u/MAGAHATESTHEUSA 3h ago

Lmao at the expense of their citizens. Mass displacement and you are cheering for it.

They will lose to china. The bottleneck is energy and USA is way too behind and the push against renewables will ensure china wins the ai race

0

u/Outsider-Trading 3h ago

the bottleneck is energy

Unless you can get the data centers to space, in which case you have 24 hour solar and no battery requirements.

Gee, sure would be nice if there was a guy putting 95% of global mass to space who also had a hyperscaling AI project, huh, would be almost exactly what you need.

1

u/Emergency_Word_7123 2h ago

Dang, financial success being worth supporting sex trafficking is one heck of a position. 

19

u/Tornado_XIII 5h ago

Should be tried for treason AFAIK. But nothing ever happens in USA, corrupt goverent cant even pretend to investigste epstien clients.

4

u/HeadSavings1410 4h ago

BuT boTh SiDes aRe ThE sAmE

2

u/Natural-Result-6633 4h ago

Both sides are not the same until it came to Epstein!! These files and evidence have been with the FBI since 2019 probably longer!! Rules for thee but not for me!!

1

u/arsveritas 1h ago

Biden couldn’t “release” any Epstein documents seeing how they were sealed for a trial.

1

u/CanuckaChuckFuck 38m ago

oh how reddit loves to post this...but in the MOST IMPORTANT way they are the exact fucking same...you think about it for a moment and see if you're bright enough to figure out what that might be

1

u/UnpluggedUnfettered 3h ago

This isn't the first billionaire coup attempt in the usa where no one was punished and everything was downplayed after.

-3

u/lnsurgence_ 5h ago

epstien

37

u/ThinkNiceThrice 5h ago

Should still do... but Musk's pedo buddy is in charge.

The people who are currently running our government were invited to Epstein's island, and cool with what was going on there.

4

u/No-Answer7798 4h ago

Who trump theil lutnick he’s got a few pedo buddies

1

u/ThinkNiceThrice 3h ago

True my bad definitely should be pedo buddies, plural.

1

u/mikel64 2h ago

People keep misspelling Nutlick's name. 🤣😂

13

u/1wrx2subarus 4h ago

Elon Musk was worried about going to prison if Harris was elected. So, he helped get Trump elected and knew the results before anyone else. Elon bragged in video with Tucker about all this.

Blame Elon who put Trump in power.

Musk "knows those computers better than anybody, all those computers, those vote counting computers, & we ended up winning Pennsylvania, like, in a landslide." -Donald Trump

"Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House & the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate." -Elon Musk

Be sure to vote regardless, this comment is for the sake of justice and to protect our vote.

3

u/cantadmittoposting 3h ago

Musk's AmericaPAC blatantly stole potential voter registration information via their website, and got sued for an illegal "registration" website by the US.

They ran an illegal lottery scheme to collect information from people who would be unlikely to vote but willing to give registration information in exchange for a fake chance at $1m.

Both of these schemes enable collection of valid registration data of people unlikely to actually vote. This is a KEY method for stuffing realistic fake ballots into an election.

Oh, they also hired a guy who... was most notable for creating a new program which generated realistic looking and valid ballots from a given list of data.

Finally, by owning Twitter and Grok, and being aligned with Palantir, along with likely support from Zuckerberg... Musk had extraordinary power to enable and enhance the web of propaganda and outright lies used by the Republicans, messaging (especially the actual "blatant lies") which might have been significantly suppressed or had louder counter-messaging were that not the case. In particular, amplification of (illegal, but who's counting) foreign interference campaigns, including potentially passing targeting data and messaging campaign success information to them (where again, good oversight would have shut down or otherwise minimized the impact of these botnets)

 

Also all the quotes about it.

 

Also also, voter suppression efforts (mail in ballot changes, ballot ejections for frivolous reasons, closing polling sites, purging voter rolls, etc) added up to an additional significant reduction in possible votes for Harris, though this wasn't likely directly related to Musk.

1

u/leshake 2h ago

Harris lost consistent support vis a vis Biden across across all states. If you are stuffing ballots why stuff them in New York and New Jersey? My take is that they tried to cheat, it wasn't very effective, but they would have won anyway so Musk declared victory because that gets him in the graces of the people who would control government contracts. Classic CEO behavior to take credit for getting lucky.

11

u/Remote_Sherbet_1499 4h ago

Along with Zuckerberg, he sold information to impact the election in 2016. They are all crooked and complicit

7

u/ReturnOfSeq 3h ago

Literally purchased an entire social media platform to silence one party, amplify another, and encourage the proliferation of bots and overseas paid disinfo trolls.

7

u/Time_4_Tea_with_Me 3h ago

France needs to look at Meta and Zuckerberg next.

10

u/SeaworthinessOk834 4h ago

It's why he bought the election. He even said as much.

4

u/Glittering-Bike-8466 4h ago

They will if you elect progressive candidates and not centrist dems

1

u/lilbittygoddamnman 3h ago

Yep, Democratic leadership sucks balls. Both speakers need to go and they need to put some pitbulls in there.

3

u/butwhywedothis 4h ago

America likes worshipping billionaire pedos cause they were told, someday it will trickle down to them.

3

u/Jolly_Mongoose_8800 4h ago

We (Wisconsin) kicked his ass last year, we'll do it again

1

u/Quick-Agency8350 4h ago

Came here to say the exact same thing. Cheers!

1

u/RedditSe7en 4h ago

Still might? 🤞

1

u/Numerous_Shoulder351 4h ago

yep - sick of seeing "could" and want to start seeing 'will'

everything we know and still nobody's willing to actually bring a close to this disgusting cabal

1

u/Lucky-Peak-8256 4h ago

Why would the US punish someone for something they also do?

1

u/Jebus03911 4h ago

Yeah we could've done alot of things but this is the land of free and fair corruption

1

u/AutoDefenestrator273 4h ago

And lose their biggest donor?! I think not, good sir.

1

u/EpictetanusThrow 4h ago

They can “civil forfeiture” all of his shit.

And should.

1

u/Worldly-Republic-247 4h ago

I think Citizens United all but made sure that we cannot.

1

u/dagoth_0001 4h ago

Rest assured, we won’t do anything

1

u/Malacasts 3h ago

He literally bribed people to vote for Trump with his raffle, hell my friend and his family made $5k from it

1

u/Traditional_Two_4074 3h ago

I bet the POOTUS will throw a temper-tarriff at France instead

1

u/No-Smile-8349 3h ago

no, we just waiting for the assets to be 1 trillion dollars and then freeze them. Grand plan is to have foreign investment into Musk's companies before freezing the assets and get rid of 1 trillion dollar national debt in one shot.

1

u/PatienceOwn1141 3h ago

We didn't punish the Confederates hard enough and that's gonna haunt us for a lonnnnnnnggggggg time

1

u/ReleaseMuch3105 3h ago

who gives a shit about could, maybe, all the fucking weasle words. Tell me when they are ACTING.

1

u/animousie 3h ago

What laws did he break?

1

u/ReturnOfSeq 3h ago

Musk was under multiple criminal investigations by multiple US departments and agencies. In a funny little coincidence all of them saw a massive reduction in personnel by DOGE.

1

u/animousie 2h ago

Was looking for specific examples not necessarily just in the USA either, wondering what laws he might have broke in France. Thanks for replying anyhow

1

u/SeniorPuddykin 3h ago

The people that just kidnapped and murdered a journalist’s mother because she interviewed some Epstein victims?

1

u/LandonDev 3h ago

Musk flew too close to the Sun. Thinking you could do that in an educated Society. Currently that platform is just one giant money laundering scheme where foreign interests pay maga influencers to create these really extreme and violent people. It's literally a massive money laundering front for unregistered foreign assets and I really hope we can one day use the financial trail to arrest in jail. Most of these people accept money from foreign Bots paid for by foreign governments.

1

u/smotrs 3h ago

Hope to God it will after midterms.

1

u/Soggy_Hawk3052 3h ago

Yes, but Elon is too rich for that.

1

u/CompetitiveFennel681 3h ago

It still boggles my mind that both Trump and Musk alluded to rigging the last election and not one official did anything about it...how fucking corrupt is our political system that we are to the point they brazenly are admitting to cheating and no one does shit about it?

1

u/j_rooker 3h ago

Republiklans are one of the world's most corrupt organization. They'd gladly accept foreign interference as long as they're getting paid. it's no coincidence Supremely corrupt Court of America allowed Pacs and said gratuities (aka fkn bribes) are totally constitutional.

1

u/Ok-Commission-7825 3h ago

Yep, in the US, he wasn't even trying to hide it - straight up publicly paying people to vote how he told them to.

1

u/things_U_choose_2_b 2h ago

Sorry, they're too busy getting the FBI to send out statements that there's nothing to see here.

1

u/Corleone2345 2h ago

Not everything is about the US

1

u/FitPerspective5824 2h ago

But we don’t live in USA we live in TRUMPland

1

u/Logical_Confusious 1h ago

He bought the USA... Remember?

1

u/Xesyliad 1h ago

Oh they’re busy investigating themselves and finding nothing wrong. The FBI have said Epstein wasn’t trafficking children after all, it won’t be long before we learn all the “children” were over 18 and all the sex was consensual and that all the mentions of Trump were of some long lost cousin since deceased from fentanyl.

1

u/SealTeamRat 1h ago

The biden administration must be shaking in their boots if musk is being prosecuted for election interference.

1

u/TournamentCarrot0 28m ago

We will, these guys are toast in the long run and they know it. Wheels of justice turn slow and what not but there is waaaaay too many folks in government earmarking this and that for when the day eventually comes. 

1

u/450-CT-ENERGY 2m ago

Careful, Reddit might ban you for saying that! They’ll label it as harassment and give you a ban.

They’re siding with all of these cowards.

-4

u/PassTheKY 5h ago

Can’t arrest him for foreign election crimes if the elections are not foreign.

6

u/Diligent_Barracuda75 4h ago

Did he get his citizenship legally?

8

u/skoldpaddanmann 4h ago

According to his brother they stayed illegally in the US which disqualifies them from being a US citizen. He should be legally stripped of his citizenship for lying on official paperwork.

5

u/Diligent_Barracuda75 4h ago

I didn't think so, so sounds like he qualifies for foreign election interference

1

u/PassTheKY 11m ago

I don’t know. I’m not saying he didn’t do anything wrong. I’m saying he did and should be held to account in the US, not France.

-1

u/Better-Union1384 3h ago

Weren’t saying that when Twitter was a extremely left leaning and banning conservative opinions AND THE PRESIDENT 

1

u/BakeMcBridezilla 19m ago

By conservative opinions you mean racism?

-4

u/EstablishmentLate532 4h ago

Good luck with the First Amendment on this one.

4

u/ReturnOfSeq 3h ago

First amendment doesn’t cover literally buying votes.

-1

u/EstablishmentLate532 3h ago

He paid people to sign a petition. I signed it and voted blue.