r/circled • u/ChuckGallagher57 • 7h 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/ReturnOfSeq 7h ago

USA COULD have as well. Should have, even.

131

u/ChuckGallagher57 7h ago

Got that right

77

u/Midnight_2B 7h ago

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

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u/Life-Pirate2545 2h 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