X are simultaneously saying they've not been made aware of the allegations, but that they deny the allegations, and that the allegations are politically motivated.
> X are simultaneously saying they've not been made aware of the allegations, but that they deny the allegations, and that the allegations are politically motivated.
What a time we live in, where things like antisemitism and supremacist views are framed as mere political inclinations that are unreasonably threatened by other people, even minorities, having rights.
>X are simultaneously saying they've not been made aware of the allegations
You're trying to imply there's some contradiction between the three statements, but there really isn't. For one, X never claimed "they've not been made aware of the allegations". The exact wording used in the article was "it “remains in the dark” about the specific allegations", which is different than not being aware of the allegations at all. Moreover it's not contradictory to deny allegations that you're not aware of the specifics about. For instance, if someone accused you of saying a racist thing, but didn't reference a specific incident, it'd be pretty reasonable to both claim you're "in the dark about the specific allegations", and to deny it. It'd also be reasonable to claim it's politically motivated, if for instance it was coming from someone you had beef with.
Louisiana is the only jurisdiction which does not adhere to the
general rule that a defendant may rely, in a criminal prosecution, upon inconsistent defenses.
(In other words: prove it. I get as many counterexamples as my lawyers can dream .)
Robert T. McGraw, Criminal Law: The Use of Inconsistent Defenses, 26 Marq. L. Rev. 167 (1942).
>France is from the legal past that the US emerged from
The French legal system has been completely revamped by Napoleon far after the US independence, and has been so successful that countries invaded by Napoleon have retained his system after being freed from him.
Meanwhile the us system is still based on a mediaeval system where nothing is ever certain and everything depends on how good a lawyer you can pay.
they are politically motivated. french gov wants a far-left researcher to investigate the algorithm. this guy was also famous for building a “leaveX” movement in france and there was a debate on the ties with CNRS and on wether they used public funding to campaign against X.
“ French authorities have requested access to X’s recommendation algorithm and real-time data about all user posts on the platform in order for several “experts” to analyze the data and purportedly “uncover the truth” about the operation of the X platform. One of those “experts” is David Chavalarias, who spearheads the “Escape X” campaign. Formerly known as “HelloQuitteX”, the campaign is dedicated to encouraging X users to leave the platform. A second “expert,” Maziyar Panahi, has previously participated in research projects with David Chavalarias that demonstrate open hostility towards X.”
4chan is a vast website with hundreds of communities. One or two are far right leaning and very extreme for sure. The integrality of reddit is left leaning with moderators actively suppressing thoughts and speech that does not align with the beliefs of the Company and the left. For instance criticizing immigration policies would get you banned on reddit.
Same for the prevalence of far right figures. I am not seeing this prevalence. Most of european union elected governements that are pro immigration, left leaning, pushing a bigger state interventionism in our daily lives under this premise that far right is prevalent. I am not seeing it.
X is one social network that indeed does not suppress some of the far right opinions. All the others social media are mostly left leaning and leaving content that is blatantly racist but targeting only one kind of people that they deemed ok to discriminate based on some crazy ideas that you cannot be racist against a majority.
How dare that person enable people to leave a toxic social media platform! Clearly he is a far left saboteur, a Stalinist who want to burn the world and send people to gulags!
Only people who have no opinion on twitter and "Roman salute" Musk should be allowed to have a look at his algorithms!
The problem is the cherrypicking by activists like you. Please find me a social media platform that is not toxic. X is literally the best one with fact checking features. If you think instagram tiktok and snapshat or even onlyfan are not a worse evil you already lost.
To answer the questions the first commenters already have but didn't bother to search for: the accusation is « altération du fonctionnement d’un système de traitement automatisé de données en bande organisée » and « extraction frauduleuse de données d’un système de traitement automatisé de données en bande organisée ».
> At the heart of this investigation lies a legal innovation. Mr. Bothorel's alert is largely based on a recent analysis published on February 6 by legal scholar and law professor Michel Séjean. In the specialist journal Dalloz, he argues that under French law, distorting the operation of a recommendation algorithm on a social network can be punishable by the same penalties as computer hacking. According to this analysis, manipulating a platform's algorithm without the users' knowledge would be punishable under Article 323-2 of the French Penal Code, which punishes “hindering or distorting the operation of an automated data processing system”.
> Obstructing or distorting the operation of an automated data processing system is punishable by five years' imprisonment and a fine of €150,000.
I would be really worried if that got applied to people working on systems they own. Take it down because of an issue? Obstruction. Make a change? Distortion.
No need to be worried about that. French law (like most others I presume?) is all about intent.
e.g. to be convicted of trespassing, it has to be proven you knew you were trespassing, or at least that you reasonably should have known.
So no, you wouldn't be convicted because you accidentally took down your own system, etc.
At the end of the day, regardless of whether the letter of the law will allow it or not, what is clearly being investigated here, is a supposed (and somewhat documented) intent at influencing the French people through a distortion of the Twitter/X algorithm.
Until now, all the "social media" platforms have essentially been regulated like hosting services, under the assumption that they have a fairly neutral stance toward the content they host. Hence they're not directly held responsible for what they display.
But if it turns out their algorithms aren't so neutral, it begs the question of whether they should be regulated like legacy medias, hence be held responsible for what they publish.
I think this is the plan here. I don't know if I agree or disagree with it yet, but basically what I think will happen if the investigation find proof of active partisanship in the algorithm (or just boosting Elons tweets):
Criminal intent probably won't be found (or without enough evidence), so this investigation won't result in a lawsuit. However, depending on the findings Twitter might have to be considered as a publisher, not as an hosting platform, and this would make twitter liable for published user content.
Once Twitter is considered as a publisher, all hell break loose for other algorithm-based social media companies.
Sorry for using French words here. Apparently there is no automated translation available anywhere on the internet. Nor does it seems possible to search "X enquete france" on any search engine to find more details.
"You're all too lazy to read the French words." "Here I've copied and pasted the French words, also you're lazy." is exactly the type of sentiment that makes zero sense.
Strange case. After the TikTok Israel saga, we all know that there are some form of algorithm manipulation or lack of manipulation going on, and if that manipulation is not favorable, then there’s a bill called for the sale of such a company to some western aligned that country.
So now France wants to criminally prosecute as though they violated some existing law?
Views on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict on tiktok is predominantly anti-Israel/pro-Palestine, which some accuse is a result of Tiktok is rigging the algorithm.
While others accuse TikTok of not doing enough to manipulate the popularity of the content to suppress pro Palestinian voices. Hence why TikTok is being forced to sell to a western buyer or risk being banned in the US.
> “There’s periods of time when TikTok is disproportionately amplifying pro-Palestine content, and there’s times when it’s disproportionately amplifying pro-Israel content,” Edelson says. “When you sum up everything over the entire study period, they amplify those two things equally, but it changes over time, initially.”
So equal. That doesn't align with claims TikTok is amplifying predominately Pro-Palestinian content.
> Pro-Palestinian content, on the other hand, jumps significantly in the second week and continues to grow steadily. But things begin to change on Oct. 27 when the number page views on pro-Israel posts skyrockets — 2,555 views per post compared to 336 views per post previously.
This look suspicious right? One type of content growing steadily and the other spiking?
>So equal. That doesn't align with claims TikTok is amplifying predominately Pro-Palestinian content.
This is moving the goalposts[1]. The original statement I made and the part you asked for source on was "Views on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict on tiktok is predominantly anti-Israel/pro-Palestine". That's not the same as Tiktok "amplifying" Palestinian/Israeli content more.
[1] If you can call it that, I'm only stating what critics of Tiktok claim, not that's my view.
> Views on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict on tiktok is predominantly anti-Israel/pro-Palestine
From most evidence, that's true if you replace "tiktok" with "Earth", too.
> which some accuse is a result of Tiktok is rigging the algorithm.
TikTok could be rigging the algorithm, but there's lots of evidence from other channels that the described result is what you'd expect if they weren't.
Even in the Western countries where Israel's support has been strong, public support has generally cratered in recent years as the long policy of genocide in Palestine has been particularly undisguised in Gaza. Basically only the American Right (excited as they are about doing an ethnic cleansing at home) remains very strongly in support of Israel.
I'd love to see the stats on that considering everyone's algorithmic approach.
I often see anti-Israeli-government/pro-Palestinian/anti-genocide content across my platforms and, when lazy, I'll wonder why then there isn't more change.
And then I wake up and realise again that I'm in a bubble.
freedom of speech is above everything. France and Europe have been pushing narratives to hinder this under the premises of fighting evil (at the moment far right). first they wanted to track any cash usage to fight "terrorism" now they want to watch over social network and remove anonymity from the web. just like they cried over deepseek not talking about tiananmen they opressed people that criticized the left-leaning propaganda baked into the GPTs/Anthropic. in a few years we will have social points like china and those who disagree with left-leaning ideas and government interventionism will be reduced to silence or even jailed.
No it is not. I have the freedom to call you all kinds of insults, but I will get banned (if I'm not already, I wouldn't know lol). It's the paradox of intolerance.
> in a few years we will have social points like china and those who disagree with left-leaning ideas and government interventionism will be reduced to silence or even jailed.
This is a slippery slope fallacy. Besides, the current powers-that-be are actively suppressing free speech already, banning books, teachings, erasing LGBTQ+ and Black history. You don't get freedom of speech either on platforms like Twitter, where for example the word "cisgender" gets actively suppressed. That's known, what isn't known is how certain topics get boosted or suppressed by their algorithms, which is why there should be transparency.
If you're afraid of the slippery slope from "the left", wake up and see what's actually happening right now. People in the US get disappeared while following the proper immigration processes. The media and speech is actively being suppressed (see the sudden cancellation of The Late Show).
>This is a slippery slope fallacy. Besides, the current powers-that-be are actively suppressing free speech already, banning books, teachings, erasing LGBTQ+ and Black history. You don't get freedom of speech either on platforms like Twitter, where for example the word "cisgender" gets actively suppressed. That's known, what isn't known is how certain topics get boosted or suppressed by their algorithms, which is why there should be transparency.
What does US culture war issues have relevance to what's going on with France? Moreover what's the implication here? Are you trying to imply that because Americans are doing right-wing censorship, it's fine or even required that France engages in left-wing censorship?
yes he implies that there is an axis of good (his ideas, biden ideas, left leaning media) and a wrong side. somehow it is hard for people biased towards an ideology to understand that they are just the other side of a same coin....
not really. taking good everywhere and leaving the trash is the only way. communism mass murdered millions of christians and europeans and chinese, it is the biggest mass murder in the history of the world. I assume you wouldnt say it isnt equally as bad as the worst of the right wing movements
> communism mass murdered millions of christians and europeans and chinese, it is the biggest mass murder in the history of the world.
Just so we're clear, are you counting German Nazi soldiers KIA by USSR communist soldiers or not? Because that will probably affect your math and whether or not I think you're arguing in good faith.
Im counting innocent victims only. The holodomor and mao great leap are the two biggest mass murder in history and surely would put communism
As something as awful as the worst of the right wing did. There is a reason the movement is banned in many countries and a secular country like turkey had to push back islam
Into schools To fight this evil ideology
Per gpt but it is in this range (could even look at some historians saying holodomor was much more than this)
Estimated deaths under communist regimes (20th century):
• USSR: 20+ million (Stalin-era purges, gulags, Holodomor, etc.)
• China (Mao): 40–70 million (Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution)
• Cambodia (Khmer Rouge): 1.7–2 million (out of 8 million population)
• Others (Eastern Europe, North Korea, etc.): several million more
Estimated deaths under far-right regimes:
• Nazi Germany: 17+ million (including 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, and millions more civilians and soldiers)
• Fascist Italy, Francoist Spain, and others: in the hundreds of thousands to millions, depending on interpretation.
Those numbers seem somewhat/mostly accurate. I'm somewhat concerned about issues raised on this page and specifically this section, but I won't re-litigate those issues here and now, as I believe you are probably aware of them and I don't think that they are especially relevant to your points, but they are relevant to why people mention these numbers:
> In his contribution, "Leviathan or Oblivion?", Ophuls wrote on the political and economical implications of environmental problems. His main argument was that "because of the tragedy of the commons, environmental problems cannot be solved through cooperation...and the rationale for government with major coercive powers is overwhelming." According to Ophuls "reforming a corrupt people is a Herculean task," which only leaves us with the choice of becoming a leviathan or oblivion.
> Eckersley (1992) argued that, "...although Ophuls has since moderated his position by placing a greater emphasis on the need for self restraint than on the need for external coercion, he continues to maintain that the latter must be resorted to if calls for the former are unsuccessful."
I'm concerned that we're on a path that leads to Leviathan or oblivion myself, and I think every world government is morphing into its most controlling form accepted by its governing bodies and local bodies public, but they aren't even paying lip service to tell us it's for our own good most of the time, it's just naked will to power.
Capitalism with Chinese characteristics doesn't really give up much to compete with republics, democratic or otherwise. Democracies have to cede a lot of moral high ground to get to the same levers of control that communism seems to hand to the leaders of one-party states. This future has a new electric car smell, like a code smell.
who defines what is an insult? the law? its interpretation based on ideology? who makes the law? in china talking about winnie the pooh can get you to jail. In western europe like (UK,Germany) that would be having memes or criticizing immigration policies
dont ever forget that the tools you build to punish and censor your opponents will be in its reach once they come to power. for instance Biden and twitter created a precedent that allowed X and Trump to happen.
The current governemtn is close to the far-right, there are more and more attacks on muslim people without much of a eep from the government, there are openly neofascists manifestations in the streets of Paris (not even just far-right, open fascist)...
macron is surrounded by people from the left, he was minister under a leftist government which paved the way to his first term, most of his policies are left-leaning: strong state interventionism, strong government spending, protection of retirements pensions, suppression of tax on renters, The immigration record for the past year exceeded all forecasts. Visas rose by 16.8%, reaching 2,858,083 in 2024, he is even trying to regularize illegal immigrants in some industries. I really don't know what media you are watching but you should stick to the facts.
the majority of attacks and acts of vandalism are against christians in France (from the order of 9-10 times more) and acts of vandalism/violence on muslims actually decreasing year after year (around 130 right now). You can push some propaganda or vision of what is France but numbers matter and looking at numbers we are a failing left leaning government that increased debt and spending like crazy and is now trying to backtrack on many topics because what is looming is what happened to the greeks.
i never said anything about being "dangerous leftist" I am just saying they are left leaning you translated that by being dangerous for some reason. I am not judging wether right or left is best. I am not biased toward any side unlike you.
left leaning is state interventionism, increase of governement debt, refusal to change the pension funds system, tax reduction on people that have no generational wealth, increased tax on people owning real estate, making the working class - besides the lowest income tier- pay for the others. I am not stating wether it is bad or good here again merely saying that most of macron big moves were to cater to the left politics.
far-right and unseen before immigration numbers should already prove to you that something is wrong with your reasoning.
The left (LFI and Communists) lost the working class long ago. - was already the case under hollande - and Macron brilliantly saw an opportunity to cater to those working class people that were not seeing immigration as the #1 problem but purchasing power, jobs, retirements pensions. This wrecked the chances of far-right parties that were focused on immigration and this also doomed the far-left - that will call anyone disagree with them right wing like you do - with a need to find their own way to seize power and they decided to focus on : immigration, racism and more recently palestine. Once again not voicing wether its good or bad. its probably all that was left to them when they had to face a brighter opponent than them.
calling Macron and his two mandates right-wing is just dishonest. we have more immigrants than ever. more governement. more debt. more spending into our social net than ever.
I dont know what you are saying. Trump just started a few months ago and the migrations at the border got divided by large numbers. Meloni reported 60% less illegal immigration last year by breaking deal with north african countries.
Trump launched DOGE, Zemmour in france is daily promoting less governement less foreign funding.
You are writing this under an article where everyone left side of the political spectrum is in favor of banning a social network because its owner criticize mass immigration, and leave free to speak some right wing ideas more than over social networks. If the far-right was in power how would you explain even the launch of a criminal probe against X. Nothing make sense in what you trying to convey.
>If the far-right was in power how would you explain even the launch of a criminal probe against X.
Ah yes, the French far right is very much in favor of letting a South African drughead billionaire with ties with the American government, India, Russia and Saudi Arabia manipulate French public opinion.
Alas, despite your passionate defense of his freedom of speech against everyone else's, Musk is still unlikely to send you his semen for you to bear his child.
What is your plan to fight evil? "Don't fight evil" is also a valid answer, but not a good one. It would be a good one in a world with substantially less evil.
I can't really blame them for trying. Even under the untrue condition of perfectly benevolent governments, it's hard problem.
Most countries have laws against foreign interference. I presume disproportionately propagating far-right content via algorithm might very well count as such an interference.
Apparently while accusations of "foreign interference" are part of the background of the investigation, the actual charges that are the main current focus of the criminal investigation are (roughly translated) modification of an automated data processing system by an organized gang, and fraudulent extraction of data from an automated data processing system by an organized gang.
> Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI has deleted “inappropriate” posts on X after the company’s chatbot, Grok, began praising Adolf Hitler, referring to itself as MechaHitler and making antisemitic comments in response to user queries.
[…]
> “The white man stands for innovation, grit and not bending to PC nonsense,” Grok said in a subsequent post.
> In a series of posts – often picking up language from users or responding to their goading – Grok repeatedly abused [Polish PM] Tusk as “a fucking traitor”, “a ginger whore” and said the former European Council president was “an opportunist who sells sovereignty for EU jobs”.
> Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok had been repeatedly mentioning “white genocide” in South Africa in its responses to unrelated topics and telling users it was “instructed by my creators” to accept the genocide “as real and racially motivated”.
> I thought France had freedom of speech but maybe not?
Freedom of speech in France (and many other countries) is not the same as the US (assuming you are from the US). Apart from the question of whether it even applies for an AI, it does not protect hate speech.
Sorry if you ban speech to the right of center then you don't have freedom of speech. "hate" is a loaded term, poorly defined. To me, it might seem you hate everyone right of center, while you think there's some clear line where speech crosses such that it can be labeled far right and a ministry of truth can slap a fine down to halt this "dangerous" speech. Meanwhile, is the "danger" equally regulated across the political spectrum and covering far-left speech as well? Of course OP didn't even bother to balance the concern about far right speech with equal concern about far left speech. You can be certain that such biases exist in any institution in which you might construct to attempt to regulate and that it would be absolutely impossible to obtain a perfect and permanent balance between the factions. Inevitably the balance of power would shift in favor of one faction or another and the more likely outcome is that the faction would use its monopoly over "truth" or "hate" to redefine even valid and factual criticism to be hate speech. Perhaps your country has already hit that tipping point and you can't even save it because you lack the liberty to do so?
Your country is demanding access to all social media of incoming visitors, jailing students for alleged antisemitism, putting hundreds on administrative leave for signing a letter about how cuts are making their job impossible, shaking money off the pockets of media companies and law firms under threat of retribution, and using medical records to arrest undocumented immigrants.
God how I hate these sorts of "far-right" VS "far-left" points.
First, the far-left is _nowhere near_ as far as the far-right is (in fact, I don't think there's _any_ significant far-left representation in France: neither the Communist Party nor the France Insoumise are far-left, they're just left).
Second, you make it sound like there's a bias towards the left, which is a ridiculous point that has no ground in reality: France is _heavily_ biased towards the right. The internal and international politics are deeply right-wing and getting _more_ right-wing by the year, most successful politicians are on the right, even the so-called left-wing governments have been doing centrist or right-wing politics since 1995: the left is _weak_ in France despite popular support. So "your country has already hit that tipping point and you can't even save it because you lack the liberty to do so" is laughable: the _people in power_ are regularly indulging in hate speech.
Third, you make it sound like the hate speech law is biased to protect the left, when the reality is that hate speech almost exclusively exists on the far-right so _obviously_ it's going to affect the right more. Let's talk about concrete examples:
You'll often hear from the far-right that people of colour are fundamentally inferior to white people. That someone of a particular ethnicity is a "savage", or is uncultured. That muslims are terrorists, jews are conspiring. There's so many examples. That's all horrific hate speech that's forbidden in France. Please do give concrete examples of far-left hate speech that you hear these days that is remotely comparable, because I cannot think of any. Maybe "kill all billionaires"? Which by the way _is_ illegal, it's incitation to violence.
So yeah, some speech at the far right (not "right of center") is forbidden in France. You seem to think that's a limitation of freedom, but the minorities feel _way_ more free for it (although they're still not having a great time, hate speech still happens).
I would say after the bot has gone off the rail three+ times and conveniently pushed specific agendas (or just went full racist) that it's probably time for an investigation to figure out who's doing what and why.
- the bot can't work in a legal void. It's pushing messages on a public platform , someone has the responsibility for that.
- if correcting speech is enough we should all be free push whatever horrible things we want online, subsequently correct them and never face any consequences whatsoever.
There are strict limitations on 'hate speech’, denial of the Holocaust is illegal, and there are laws still on the books (and some examples of media outlets being prosecuted for breaking those laws) around presenting drug use as a positive thing, or encouraging drug use.
You can be prosecuted as an "apologist for terrorism” should the government conclude that this is what you are doing. You can also be charged with “contempt of public officials” as people were for burning an effigy of President Macron.
In the US, as far as I know as someone who has only ever visited the country for a short time, you are allowed to hold the President in contempt, you can announce to anyone who’ll listen your ignorant, racist, Holocaust-denying opinions and not be afraid of that speech being criminalized (though there are social costs you’ll probably pay), and if you want to go on the internet and encourage people to try drugs, you can. You can support whatever side of whatever conflict around the world you like with your words and you probably won’t be breaking the law.
France’s laws around freedom of expression are strong, but they are different to those in the US and I would say offer fewer protections for citizens than the US 1st amendnment.
In the US and most countries though, there's libel / defamation laws; you can say a lot of shit about people, but they can then sue you for libel / defamation if you spout nonsense.
Those same laws exist here in France, too, even if they are a little more complex. The truth of a statement, for example, is not a sufficient defence if that truth is not something that is public. Making someones private life public, even if your comment is true, can be against the law.
Defamation might be illegal in both the US and France, but I can burn an American flag and show contempt for the US President without commiting a crime the US. Do the same in the France and you don’t have the same protections for your speech.
> A bot went off the rails, and was subsequently corrected.
How sure are you about that? I mean, it is more likely that the bot overshot how it was expected to push propaganda. Musk is on record expressing disagreement with how LLMs are trained to be "politicaly-correct", which is a dog whistle for pushing extremist views.
> Again, what is the problem? I thought France had freedom of speech but maybe not?
This is a puerile and simplistic view of what freedom of speech is. You are free t speak your mind, but others around you are free from experiencing abuse and discrimination. Also, media has more responsibilities than morons running their mouth, and even those are liable for hate speech.
> You are free t speak your mind, but others around you are free from experiencing abuse and discrimination.
No, you can't have freedom of speech and forbid the of hurting someone's feelings. The very speech that needs to be protected is damningly truthful speech. I'll suffer through a million fools and idiots spouting off nonsense just so that one person who, against all popular delusion and immense social pressure, when men and women in large numbers often go mad with hysteria as if a viral fad, and with the fortitude of knowing they are correct, can appeal to society at large without fear of arrest or legal consequences. These are the ones who change history for the better. The fools are like gnats, they are quite easy to ignore and swat off. The barriers you construct to make people stay within the lines are shackles on thought itself. These barriers inevitably get reinforced by the powerful until no thinking is done at all.
If you don't see the problem with far-right rhetoric then you are part of the problem. Europe has free speech protections, but only within reason; nazi symbolism is explicitly banned in Germany for example, and holocaust denial is also illegal.
Then there's some things you can say without getting into legal trouble, but you may get killed for it by those you offend.
No I don't see the problem. We've had Freedom of Speech for 250 years in the USA and our democracy has lasted longer than anyone's. France is on their 15th or 16th government in that amount of time. Perhaps if the copied the Bill of Rights verbatim they would still be on their 1st.
Don't even get me started on Nazis. Their most effective tool for control over citizens was restriction of speech. The Reichstag Fire decree being exhibit A.
The far left is just as awful and the USSR's glavlit, gulag, etc were extremely effective at silencing criticism. All ever in the name of order and peace, but in truth a consolidation of power.
> Then there's some things you can say without getting into legal trouble, but you may get killed for it by those you offend.
Sure, this is why Americans have a phrase called "Live free or die". If you're not willing to die for liberty then your fear of death will be used to control you. So fuck em, say what you think.
> In France, a woman spent 23 hours in custody for giving French President Emmanuel Macron the middle finger. (She was acquitted after arguing she had pointed her finger in the air and not directly at the president.)
These things kept happening for 2-3 years with pre-ChatGPT LLM tech demos from Microsoft, Meta and Google.
Not to be an apologist of course, just wanted to point out that it may be a sign of them being behind the curve on some technical aspects, or at least on best practice, likely on purpose. Sure they probably did some ideological meddling too.
For all the (valid) criticism on alignment/censoring, one has to acknowledge the success of the pragmatic approach from OpenAI and Anthropic. As much as we might not want to admit it, bit of censoring is kind of critical to be able to use LLMs seriously to solve real problems.
That doesn't really prove that much. They only made 3 accounts on X, then with each account they followed the 4 major parties and their leaders. Not a very good sample size.
Additionally, the underlying algo could lean toward to what causes more engagement rather than equally tailoring each party. Without having any information personally about German politics or their cultural engagement with social media, I can only anecdotally say that in America, it appears to me that the ones most engaged with social media on X are more often than not right leaning. More of the left-leaning engagement seems increasingly moving towards other outlets, such as Bluesky.
> I can only anecdotally say that in America, it appears to me that the ones most engaged with social media on X are more often than not right leaning. More of the left-leaning engagement seems increasingly moving towards other outlets, such as Bluesky.
Isn't that movement because Musk changed X to increase promotion of right-wing things and decrease promotion of left-wing things?
Before Musk Twitter did promote right-wing stuff more than left-wing stuff. I don't have a cite but there was a paper published by researchers who had been given full access to internal Twitter data that showed this.
That level of right-leaning is probably the level of right-leaning you get from the natural level of engagement you get on a fairly neutral platform from right-wing people being more likely to engage than left-wing people.
After Elon bought Twitter, they ended up losing something like 10% of their users. That's going to be made up mostly of highly ideological ostensibly left-leaning Americans, likely with a much higher than average "engagement." And the lion's share of that happened long before there were any meaningful algorithmic changes. That alone is going to create a meaningful shift in the status quo on overtly political topics.
You seem confused. France launched a criminal probe, whose goal is to investigate whether these types of biases reflect actual manipulation from Twitter. You are presented with evidence suggesting these biases exist. Now France is expected to look into them. Their findings will either support a criminal case, reject a criminal case, or simply not support further investigations.
> Pushing antisemitism, holocaust denial, and supremacist content is not ok, even if you argue they are only pushing extremist content for the clicks (which is a laughably bad hypothesis as Twitter's business model depends on the platform having mainstream appeal)
What if e.g. right-leaning content gets more likes/upvotes and this makes the algorithm show the posts more? That way, the algorithm can still be neutral, but the result is not.
"The left can't meme" is just one instance of so-called "meme magic" that came good, if good is what you see in the enterprise or if the particular ends justified the memes.
> In Russia, Vladimir Putin and his cabinet of political technologists create mass confusion. Vladislav Surkov uses ideas from art to turn Russian politics into a bewildering piece of theatre. Donald Trump employs the same techniques in his presidential campaign by using language from Occupy Wall Street. Curtis asserts that Trump "defeated journalism" by rendering its fact-checking abilities irrelevant.
> The American Left's attempt to resist Trump on the internet had no effect. In fact, they were just feeding the social media corporations who valued their many additional clicks.
> Vladislav Yuryevich Surkov (Russian: Владислав Юрьевич Сурков; born 21 September 1964) is a Russian politician. He was First Deputy Chief of the Russian Presidential Administration from 1999 to 2011, during which time he was often viewed as the main ideologist of the Kremlin who proposed and implemented the concept of sovereign democracy in Russia. From December 2011 until May 2013, Surkov served as the Russian Federation's Deputy Prime Minister. After his resignation, Surkov returned to the Presidential Executive Office and became a personal adviser of Vladimir Putin on relationships with Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Ukraine.
> BBC documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis credits Surkov's blend of theater and politics with keeping Putin, and Putin's chosen successors, in power since 2000.
> Whilst talking about sovereign democracy in 2006, Mikhail Kasyanov said that "... the aims of this doctrine are quite clear: the concentration and holding of political power and property at any cost. The consequences of this are already evident, including the glorification of populism, the steady destruction of private and public institutions and the departure from the principles of the law, democracy, and the free market."
> United States Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Daniel Fried (in office 2005–2009) stated in a 2007 interview:
> > I get nervous when people put labels in front of democracy. Sovereign democracy, managed democracy, people's democracy, socialist democracy, Aryan democracy, Islamic democracy—I am not a big fan of adjectives. Managed democracy doesn't sound like democracy. Sovereign democracy strikes me as meaningless.
> Guided democracy, also called directed democracy and managed democracy, is a formally democratic government that functions as a de facto authoritarian government or, in some cases, as an autocratic government. Such hybrid regimes are legitimized by elections, but do not change the state's policies, motives, and goals.
> In a guided democracy, the government controls elections such that the people can exercise democratic rights without truly changing public policy. While they follow basic democratic principles, there can be major deviations towards authoritarianism. Under managed democracy, the state's continuous use of propaganda techniques, such as through manufacturing consent, prevents the electorate from having a significant impact on policy.
> The concept is also related to semi-democracy, also known as anocracy.
Subpoena the company and demand registration data for accounts flagged as looking like foreign influence. If it's a foreign IP or email, it's foreign influence. If it's through a proxy or VPN, it's likely foreign influence.
It is that simple. If Twitter doesn't comply with court orders like that, they will no longer be allowed to operate within France or the EU. Never ever think companies are above the law or don't have to cooperate with requests like this, that's a defeatist attitude.
That's literally a fishing expedition that could be exploited to harvest information on whoever one likes. It's the reason our legal system requires a substantial burden of evidence before one can even think of pursuing a warrant.
I mean seriously think about the implications of your concept here. X is a worldwide service. Should X just be an information broker dealing out the details on users to any country that makes claims as nebulous as 'foreign influence'? It's a term which can be (and often is) whimsically applied to essentially anybody who happens to disagree with some regime in a given country.
The situations seem unrelated. There's a much more informative article on what's happening in India here. [1] India is censoring accounts in India which X complies with by making it clear that's what is happening as well as providing information to the user on how to legally challenge it.
France, by contrast, seems to be making poorly defined and largely unfalsifiable claims about X's algorithm itself. I do not believe X would comply if a country began demanding algorithmic changes, as the main reason you'd go after the algorithm is to enact censorship with no transparency, which is very much in the spirit of contemporary French politics.
Of course it is falsifiable, that is why they ask to review what is the algorithm, what was changed and why. Given how mercurial Musk is, you can be sure that he's asked his team to bias the algo - not least to boost himself. Again, perfectly demonstrable in a factual way.
X already complies with Germany's ban on nazi material. If that's not an lagorithmic change, what is?
>which is very much in the spirit of contemporary French politics.
You're again describing something where there is straight forward censorship. This is relatively easily done without algorithmic changes and enables X to provide complete transparency to the user about the censorship, as well as any legal recourse or other options a user might have. France, instead, wants the algorithm to promote material in a certain way which is radically different, and can be utilized to censor things without any accountability or transparency.
As for falsifiability, proving a negative is generally impossible. This is how witch trials were able to be successful. You can't really prove you aren't a witch, when the person accusing you already assumes that you are. This is why the burden of proof is on the person making accusations, as opposed to 'Let me go into your house and see if I can find anything that I might be able to use as evidence to justify my hunch that you're a witch. Ah hah, I found a dead frog! Burn the witch!'
>can be utilized to censor things without any accountability or transparency
What is the current accountability or transparency of the X algorithm?
Ah yes, Musk promised to make it public, and... it hasn't been updated in two years.
https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm
And clearly, the promotion of Musk's tweets on everyone's timeline is completely organic.
>This is why the burden of proof is on the person making accusations
Yeah, this is all a WITCH HUNT! No justice department has ever done any investigation in the history of humanity, warrants don't exist, people are only judged by what is publicly known without police ever seizing any private material. WITCH HUNT!
There is obviously no accountability for social media algorithms, anywhere. Facebook/Instagram/YouTube are conspicuously algorithmically downranking (and on occasion overtly censoring) pro-Palestinian content, but the political establishment in Western bloc nations don't care, because they don't want unbiased algorithms - they want algorithms that are biased to push their issues of the day.
And Elon is being followed by some 220 million+ people. That's a not insubstantial chunk of the entire human race, let alone the subset of X users. It's unsurprising that his comments would end up highly promoted by most of any algorithm that significantly weights account popularity, which all do - excepting perhaps TikTok.
To get a warrant you need to present strong probable cause to a judge - not liking what is being promoted would not suffice.
So should X give information to Iran on any Jewish account it suspects of engaging in "foreign influence"? How about to Russia on any Ukraine account, or vice versa? What about to everywhere else in the world and information on US accounts some country somewhere suspects of engaging in "foreign influence"?
Somehow rules seem to no longer apply when we start consider them being applied against our interests. This is a big part of the reason why the 'rules based order' is now mostly just sardonic mockery.
> But disproportionately propagating far-left content is cool.
Twitter was already caught hard coding rules to downrank content that reported Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and Russia has been continuously conducting a destabilization campaign in Europe by supporting radical fringe political movements, both far left and far right.
Well, in a way yes. During an election day and the day before, you are not allowed to push official communication (ie a political party can tell you "Go vote" but not "Go vote for us because we will put a stop to immigration") be it via a website, email, mail, etc. See https://presidentielle2022.conseil-constitutionnel.fr/l-elec.... So a sponsored post from a political party appearing in your timeline would be an issue due to the platform if it ignores these rules.
I'm not overly familiar with the law and I'm not defending that (I despise both the government and Elon Musk) but there are indeed laws regulating speeches and on top of that laws are flexible and the politician's power over them is quite strong. They had no problem forbidding Russian tv channels in a few days back when the war in Ukraine started
What constitutes illegal algorithm manipulation? What obligations to impartiality do digital space providers like Musk/X have?
Not sure what laws exist but it seems tricky to design a coherent legal standard around what sorts of algorithms are allowed. I'd rather just be able to choose between open-source algorithms, that way we can just not use the one that pushes {Billionaire}'s latest post to the top.
Those all seem to me to be "altering a system against the wishes of the owners", hopefully not "altering a system you own against the wishes of the state".
(auto translation)
> Fraudulently accessing or maintaining access to all or part of an automated data processing system is punishable by three years' imprisonment and a fine of €100,000.
> Where this results in either the deletion or modification of data contained in the system, or an alteration of the functioning of this system, the penalty is five years' imprisonment and a fine of €150,000.
Unless I've missed something more specific lower down.
Based on all available evidence, I tend to agree with X that this "investigation" does, in fact, appear to be politically motivated. I don't see any substantive evidence to the contrary.
It's not that I like twitter but believing that the current government (or whatever one that is able to replace it) will give an interesting model providing both free speech and a reasonable regulation is a joke
So, what you're saying is, that you expect the French government will be about as effective as Xitter senior leadership, and possibly worse. That's a fair point actually ...
Yes, basically. They won't find criminal intent, so that probe won't end in a lawsuit, but I bet it will end up changing Twitter status from hosting service to publisher.
OK, so EU is allowed to manipulate social media under various threats, and now when some social media says enough of this, they are criminalized? And people are applauding it?
Those threats are called "laws". We strive to the ideal of living in a society that respects laws. Twitter/X is free to leave if they don't like it, of course.
Yeah but then laws need to be clear, understandable and possible to enforce fairly.
What is X accused of specifically? "Algorithm manipulation" doesn't sound like a crime to me.
It is if you find criminal intent. They probably won't find any, so the probe won't end up in a lawsuit.
Basically it's a discovery process before a litigation. I'm 99.99% sure it won't end up in a lawsuit.
My bet is that the probe will end up saying: 'criminal intent can't be proven'. Then either the parquet (basically DOJ but less political) or customer protection will say "this probe showed that your algorithm wasn't neutral, you choose which content to show and which not show, you're a publisher now" and Twitter will have to prove it's not, or be treated as a publisher.
There is an investigation (there are named offenses that are the main, but not stated as exclusive, focus), not an accusation against X and various individuals.
The investigation may, depending on what it finds, result in accusations against some or all of the people on whom the investigation is focused, but whether it will and what the accusations will be is not known until the investigation has occurred.
TV, Radio, Press, Outdoors, and every other media have laws and regulations - laws and regulations set by elected officials, that go through a transparent process, and for which people might disagree and vote out those elected officials. This ranges from the amount of advertising space, content, and political propaganda; everything has a set of rules and regulations.
Why is it ok for you to have a billionaire do whatever he wants, including spreading disinformation and propaganda, and allow for bot networks to spread propaganda from foreign agents, without any accountability?
Why should we have no rules for social media, while all the remaining media have to abide by laws and are held accountable for it?
Why should a billionaire have more power than the people who voted?
Why should the billionaires that set the current EU social networking policy be more important than the lone billionaire that runs X? Or do you think these policies are organic and come from the EU population itself?
As I said: these decisions are made by elected officials.
If there's a conspiracy of corruption/lobbying/interests behind those countries' decisions, it's a completely different problem that is for those countries' regulators to control, and/or for the people to choose to vote for someone else.
France isn't Russia or Iran, where you have an illegitimate regime that does whatever it wants above their law and constitution.
A Conspiracy Theory doesn't give any right to the billionaire owner of the social network to be above the law.
AFAIK X is owned by an American billionaire, not a Russian/Iranian one, so please don't pollute the argument with irrelevant strawmen. What we are seeing real-time is a failure/hack of representative democracy that serves only some extremely small, but well-connected minority at the levers of power that are willing to drive EU to the ground just to stay in power (see EU economic performance since 2008).
Well, you're taking what I said out of context, because it was YOU who brought the conspiracy theory stating that France/EU illegitimately serves the interests of billionaires, whereas I compared it to countries such as Russia/Iran.
So don't try to spin your irrelevant bad takes on me, own up to them.
> What we are seeing...
What you're seeing is that a billionaire is being held accountable, and for some unknown reason, you don't like it. You don't represent the opinion of anyone but yourself.
Strawman fallacy, poisoning the well, circumstantial ad hominem, implied tu quoque, accusation & moralistic framing, dismissive language & loaded terms, shifting blame & victim reversal, false attribution of motive, appeal to irrelevance, aggressive & dismissive tone - I am impressed. Taking rhétorique noire classes?
I listed all logical fallacies and "schwarze rhetorik" kinds I could find in your previous statements and I am mighty impressed you fitted so many in such a short space. I was wondering if you are a student of these dark arts or if it comes naturally to you?
Are you libertine's alter ego? Reusing the same arsenal of logical fallacies? Don't you feel like you should be original and forge your own path through these dark arts?
he complies with those law and even proved it thousands of times. he even said it himself that he had to comply to country law and blocked/banned accounts french gov asked him to
Do you believe that your political opponents investigating an "algorithm" to prove it is "manipulated" would not already have written the output of this investigation?
Every freaking machine learning model has a bias. ask GPT or anthropic about palestine or even Trump, ask Deepseek about tiananmen. If you search for something you will find it. I could take GPT and prove its "manipulated" toward any race I want. Ill just start from this affirmation and then find things good enough to prove it to random people that will read the billionaire backed press that you praise
I'm not sure what you're trying to imply. Didn't the Twitter algorithm change in July 2024 after Elon endorsed Trump, to increase his reach and the reach of other individuals?[0]
> Every freaking machine learning model has a bias.
You're saying this like there's no human decision behind it. As if it's an act of nature and "oh well that's how it turned out to be!", without any concern for legality, revenue, growth, user engagement, nothing matters, it's just "the algorithm doing its thing".
Every social media algorithm is tailored, and people continually modify them. Heck, Google even named their algorithm updates for search!
But let's entertain that idea of lack of agency - just because they don't have agency over the algorithm (which they do), they can still shut it down. If they can't control whether an algorithm promotes illegal stuff, or if it's being massively used by foreign agents' bot networks, then should they be running their own business?
But hey, somehow they have it figured out for advertisers! lmao
per your link. couldnt you entertain the possibility that those voices were silenced by left leaning twitter policies? they even admitted it. it appears now to this same leaning press that actually there are plenty of right wing voices in USA (like the ones that voted for trump). I am not sure what is the problem. just like and follow people of the left and the algorithm will adapt.
Romania really needs to fix their election system.
They are using a system where the winner is whoever gets more than 50%, but if nobody gets more than 50% they hold a run-off vote between the top two from the first vote.
The problem is that Romania has several viable political parties, which would be great if they used an election system designed to handle that like ranked choice, but in a top two run-off system has a high chance of electing someone that a large majority of the voters rank near the bottom of the candidates.
In the election you are referring to there were candidates from 10 different parties plus 4 independents running. I believe 6 of the parties were right-wing and 4 left-wing. The right-wing parties got 47% of the votes, with the top 3 of them getting 19.18%, 13.86%, and 8.79%.
The left-wing parties got 20% with the highest part getting 19.15%.
Independents got 33% with the highest individual getting 22.94%.
france actually has the same. this is how they decided the president of france for 2 decades. forcing french people to choose the lesser evil. but somehow romania doesnt have this freedom because they chose wrong apparently.
