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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/08/india-twitte...