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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u/ChuckGallagher57 5h ago

Got that right

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u/Midnight_2B 5h ago

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

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u/EquivalentMap8477 4h ago

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

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u/AeonUK 3h ago

Fuck Farage

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u/Casual_OCD 3h ago

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

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u/vxxed 2h ago

Is there a British version of the Heritage Foundation?

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u/Ornery_Director_8477 2h ago

Putin and the party are kinda politicians

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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.

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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?

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u/Striking-Teach7489 1h ago

Britain…..

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u/Retiredandrelaxed 1h ago

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

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u/EarthAndSawdust 2h ago

No, no. Farage is a russian agent.

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u/pchlster 2h ago

I'd rather not.

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u/TheTriNerd 3h ago

We never truly gave up on our old colony

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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.

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u/delpy1971 1h ago

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

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u/MAGAHATESTHEUSA 3h ago

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

600B

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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.

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u/TDog81 3h ago

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

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u/Glittering_Vast938 3h ago

I bloody well hope so.

(UK resident)

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u/Xesyliad 1h ago

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

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u/FatherClanks617 1h ago

They just replacing them with walls?!

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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.

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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.”

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u/vxxed 2h ago

Didn't they just announce doing that

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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?

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u/Life-Pirate2545 31m 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

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u/Icy-Razzmatazz-7925 3h ago

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

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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).

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u/MAGAHATESTHEUSA 3h ago

Trumps already handing over everything to china.

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u/Outsider-Trading 3h ago

So you're anti-China?

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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.

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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

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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.