31 ms·

X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

596 points by vikaveri 8mo ago

pogue 8mo ago
Finally, someone is taking action against the CSAM machine operating seemingly without penalty.
- chrisjj 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - secretsatan 8mo ago
    It doesn't mention grok?
    - chrisjj 8mo ago
      Sure does. Twice. E.g. Musk's social media platform has recently been subject to intense scrutiny over sexualised images generated and edited on the site using its AI tool Grok.
      - mfru 8mo ago
        CTRL-F "grok": 0/0 found
        lawn 8mo ago
        I found 8 mentions.
        chrisjj 8mo ago
        You're using an "AI" browser? :)
  - mortarion 8mo ago
    CSAM does not have a universal definition. In Sweden for instance, CSAM is any image of an underage subject (real or realistic digital) designed to evoke a sexual response. If you take a picture of a 14 year old girl (age of consent is 15) and use Grok to give her bikini, or make her topless, then you are most definately producing and possessing CSAM. No abuse of a real minor is needed.
    - worthless-trash 8mo ago
      As good as Australia's little boobie laws.
      - chrisjj 8mo ago
        https://www.theregister.com/2010/01/28/australian_censors/ https://www.theregister.com/2010/01/28/australian_censors/
    - chrisjj 8mo ago
      > CSAM does not have a universal definition. Strange that there was no disagreement before "AI", right? Yet now we have a clutch of new "definitions" all of which dilute and weaken the meaning. > In Sweden for instance, CSAM is any image of an underage subject (real or realistic digital) designed to evoke a sexual response. No corroboration found on web. Quite the contrary, in fact: "Sweden does not have a legislative definition of child sexual abuse material (CSAM)" https://rm.coe.int/factsheet-sweden-the-protection-of-children-against-sexual-exploitatio/1680acdef9 https://rm.coe.int/factsheet-sweden-the-protection-of-childr... > If you take a picture of a 14 year old girl (age of consent is 15) and use Grok to give her bikini, or make her topless, then you are most definately producing and possessing CSAM. > No abuse of a real minor is needed. Even the Google "AI" knows better than that. CSAM "is considered a record of a crime, emphasizing that its existence represents the abuse of a child." Putting a bikini on a photo of a child may be distasteful abuse of a photo, but it is not abuse of a child - in any current law.
      - lava_pidgeon 8mo ago
        " Strange that there was no disagreement before "AI", right? Yet now we have a clutch of new "definitions" all of which dilute and weaken the meaning. " Are you from Sweden? Why do you think the definition was clear across the world and not changed "before AI"? Or is it some USDefaultism where Americans assume their definition was universal?
  - moolcool 8mo ago
    Are you implying that it's not abuse to "undress" a child using AI? You should realize that children have committed suicide before because AI deepfakes of themselves have been spread around schools. Just because these images are "fake" doesn't mean they're not abuse, and that there aren't real victims.
    - chrisjj 8mo ago
      > Are you implying that it's not abuse to "undress" a child using AI? Not at all. I am saying just it is not CSAM. > You should realize that children have committed suicide before because AI deepfakes of themselves have been spread around schools. Its terrible. And when "AI"s are found spreading deepfakes around schools, do let us know.
      - mrtksn 8mo ago
        CSAM: Child Sexual Abuse Material. When you undress a child with AI, especially publicly on Twitter or privately through DM, that child is abused using the material the AI generated. Therefore CSAM.
        chrisjj 8mo ago
        > When you undress a child with AI, I guess you mean pasting a naked body on a photo of a child. > especially publicly on Twitter or privately through DM, that child is abused using the material the AI generated. In which country is that? Here in UK, I've never heard of anyone jailed for doing that. Whereas many are for making actual child sexual abuse material.
      - enaaem 8mo ago
        [flagged]
- tjpnz 8mo ago
  It's also a massive problem on Meta. Hopefully this action isn't just a one-off.
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    Does Meta publish it themselves or is it user–generated?
robtherobber 8mo ago
> The prosecutor's office also said it was leaving X and would communicate on LinkedIn and Instagram from now on. I mean, perhaps it's time to completely drop these US-owned, closed-source, algo-driven controversial platforms, and start treating the communication with the public that funds your existence in different terms. The goal should be to reach as many people, of course, but also to ensure that the method and medium of communication is in the interest of the public at large.
- spacecadet 8mo ago
  This. What a joke. Im still waiting on my tax refund from NYC for plastering "twitter" stickers on every publicly funded vehicle.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- valar_m 8mo ago
  >The goal should be to reach as many people, of course, but also to ensure that the method and medium of communication is in the interest of the public at large. Who decides what communication is in the interest of the public at large? The Trump administration?
  - robtherobber 8mo ago
    You appear to have posted a bit of a loaded question here, apologies if I'm misinterpreting your comment. It is, of course, the public that should decide what communication is of public interest, at least in a democracy operating optimally. I suppose the answer, if we're serious about it, is somewhat more nuanced. To begin, public administrations should not get to unilaterally define "the public interest" in their communication, nor should private platforms for that matter. Assuming we're still talking about a democracy, the decision-making should be democratically via a combination of law + rights + accountable institutions + public scrutiny, with implementation constraints that maximise reach, accessibility, auditability, and independence from private gatekeepers. The last bit is rather relevant, because the private sector's interests and the citizen's interests are nearly always at odds in any modern society, hence the state's roles as rule-setter (via democratic processes) and arbiter. Happy to get into further detail regarding the actual processes involved, if you're genuinely interested. That aside - there are two separate problems that often get conflated when we talk about these platforms: - one is reach: people are on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, so publishing there increases distribution; public institutions should be interested in reaching as many citizens as possible with their comms; - the other one is dependency: if those become the primary or exclusive channels, the state's relationship with citizens becomes contingent on private moderation, ranking algorithms, account lockouts, paywalls, data extraction, and opaque rule changes. That is entirely and dangerously misaligned with democratic accountability. A potential middle position could be ti use commercial social platforms as secondary distribution instead of the authoritative channel, which in reality is often the case. However, due to the way societies work and how individuals operate within them, the public won't actually come across the information until it's distributed on the most popular platforms. Which is why some argue that they should be treated as public utilities since dominant communications infrastructure has quasi-public function (rest assured, I won't open that can of worms right now). Politics is messy in practice, as all balancing acts are - a normal price to pay for any democratic society, I'd say. Mix that with technology, social psychology and philosophies of liberty, rights, and wellbeing, and you have a proper head-scratcher on your hands. We've already done a lot to balance these, for sure, but we're not there yet and it's a dynamic, developing field that presents new challenges.
vessenes 8mo ago
Interesting. This is basically the second enforcement on speech / images that France has done - first was Pavel Durov @ Telegram. He eventually made changes in Telegram's moderation infrastructure and I think was allowed to leave France sometime last year. I don't love heavy-handed enforcement on speech issues, but I do really like a heterogenous cultural situation, so I think it's interesting and probably to the overall good to have a country pushing on these matters very hard, just as a matter of keeping a diverse set of global standards, something that adds cultural resilience for humanity. linkedin is not a replacement for twitter, though. I'm curious if they'll come back post-settlement.
- derrida 8mo ago
  I wouldn't equate the two. There's someone who was being held responsible for what was in encrypted chats. Then there's someone who published depictions of sexual abuse and minors. Worlds apart.
  - cbeach 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    - techblueberry 8mo ago
      In November 2012, Epstein sent Musk an email asking “how many people will you be for the heli to island”. “Probably just Talulah and me. What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” Musk replied, in an apparent reference to his former wife Talulah Riley. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/30/elon-musk-epstein-files-island-visits https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/30/elon-musk... I think there's just as much evidence Clinton did as Musk. Gates on the other hand.
      - antonymoose 8mo ago
pu_pe 8mo ago
I suppose those are the offices from SpaceX now that they merged.
- omnimus 8mo ago
  So France is raiding offices of US military contractor?
  - mkjs 8mo ago
    How is that relevant? Are you implying that being a US military contractor should make you immune to the laws of other countries that you operate in? The onus is on the contractor to make sure any classified information is kept securely. If by raiding an office in France a bunch of US military secrets are found, it would suggest the company is not fit to have those kind of contracts.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - fanatic2pope 8mo ago
    Even if it is, being affiliated with the US military doesn't make you immune to local laws. https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/us-marines-okinawa-japan-sexual-assualt-b2675964.html https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/us...
  - hermanzegerman 8mo ago
    I know it's hard to grasp for you. But in France, french laws and jurisdiction applies, not those of the United States
    - watwut 8mo ago
      To be fair, it is common confusion. In other comments, you see people arguing by US constitution.
    - omnimus 8mo ago
      It's not at all hard to grasp for me. I think it's great actually.
afavour 8mo ago
I’m sure Musk is going to say this is about free speech in an attempt to gin up his supporters. It isn’t. It’s about generating and distributing non consensual sexual imagery, including of minors. And, when notified, doing nothing about it. If anything it should be an embarrassment that France are the only ones doing this. (it’ll be interesting to see if this discussion is allowed on HN. Almost every other discussion on this topic has been flagged…)
- cbeach 8mo ago
  > when notified, doing nothing about it When notified, he immediately: * "implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing" - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce8gz8g2qnlo * locked image generation down to paid accounts only (i.e. those individuals that can be identified via their payment details). Have the other AI companies followed suit? They were also allowing users to undress real people, but it seems the media is ignoring that and focussing their ire only on Musk's companies...
  - derrida 8mo ago
    The other LLMs probably don't have the training data in the first place.
    - chrisjj 8mo ago
      Er... "Study uncovers presence of CSAM in popular AI training dataset" https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/20/csam_laion_dataset/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/20/csam_laion_dataset/.
  - afavour 8mo ago
    You and I must have different definitions of the word “immediately”. The article you posted is from January 15th. Here is a story from January 2nd: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98p1r4e6m8o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98p1r4e6m8o > Have the other AI companies followed suit? They were also allowing users to undress real people No they weren’t? There were numerous examples of people feeding the same prompts to different AIs and having their requests refused. Not to mention, X was also publicly distributing that material, something other AI companies were not doing. Which is an entirely different legal liability.
techblueberry 8mo ago
I'm not saying I'm entirely against this, but just out of curiosity, what do they hope to find in a raid of the french offices, a folder labeled "Grok's CSAM Plan"?
- afavour 8mo ago
  It was known that Grok was generating these images long before any action was taken. I imagine they’ll be looking for internal communications on what they were doing, or deciding not to do, doing during that time.
- Mordisquitos 8mo ago
  What do they hope to find, specifically? Who knows, but maybe the prosecutors have a better awareness of specifics than us HN commenters who have not been involved in the investigation. What may they find, hypothetically? Who knows, but maybe an internal email saying, for instance, 'Management says keep the nude photo functionality, just hide it behind a feature flag', or maybe 'Great idea to keep a backup of the images, but must cover our tracks', or perhaps 'Elon says no action on Grok nude images, we are officially unaware anything is happening.'
  - cwillu 8mo ago
    Or “regulators don't understand the technology; short of turning it off entirely, there's nothing we can do to prevent it entirely, and the costs involved in attempting to reduce it are much greater than the likely fine, especially given that we're likely to receive such a fine anyway.”
    - pirates 8mo ago
      They could shut it off out of a sense of decency and respect, wtf kind of defense is this?
      - cwillu 8mo ago
        You appear to have lost the thread (or maybe you're replying to things directly from the newcomments feed? If so, please stop it.), we're talking about what sort of incriminating written statements the raid might hope to discover.
Altern4tiveAcc 8mo ago
> Prosecutors say they are now investigating whether X has broken the law across multiple areas. This step could come before a police raid. This looks like plain political pressure. No lives were saved, and no crime was prevented by harassing local workers.
- moolcool 8mo ago
  > This looks like plain political pressure. No lives were saved, and no crime was prevented by harassing local workers. The company made and released a tool with seemingly no guard-rails, which was used en masse to generate deepfakes and child pornography.
  - gulfofamerica 8mo ago
    [dead]
  - ChrisGreenHeur 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - KaiserPro 8mo ago
      Not really, they put a shit ton of effort in to make sure you can't create any kind of nude/suggestive pictures of anyone. I imagine they have strict controls on making images of children, but I don't feel inclined to find out.
      - ChrisGreenHeur 8mo ago
        you understand that the brush tool in photoshop exists?
  - trhway 8mo ago
    Internet routers, network cards, the computers, OS and various application software have no guardrails and is used for all the nefarious things. Why those companies aren't raided?
SilverElfin 8mo ago
[flagged]
- Bender 8mo ago
  In my opinion I think the reason they raided the offices for CSAM would be there are laws on the books for CSAM and not for social manipulation. If people could be jailed for manipulation there would be no social media platforms, lobbyists, political campaign groups or advertisements. People are already being manipulated by AI. On a related note given AI is just a tool and requires someone to tell it to make CSAM I think they will have to prove intent possibly by grabbing chat logs, emails and other internal communications but I know very little about French law or international law.
  - SilverElfin 8mo ago
    Given America passed PAFACA (intended to ban TikTok, which Trump instead put in hands of his friends), I would think Europe would also have a similar law. Is that not the case?
    - Bender 8mo ago
      Are you talking about this [1]? I don't know the answer to your question whether or not the EU has the same policy. That is talking about control by a foreign adversary. I think that would delve into whether or not the USA would be considered a foreign adversary to France. I was under the impression we were allies since like the 1800s or so despite some little tiffs now and again. [1] - https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521 https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521
      - EngineerUSA 8mo ago
        [flagged]
      - direwolf20 8mo ago
        EngineerUSA needs to vastly change his tone to avoid being flagged. I vouched it because it's broadly true but the wording could be a LOT better.
etchalon 8mo ago
[flagged]
- lingrush4 8mo ago
  Every AI system is capable of generating CSAM and deep fakes if requested by a savvy user. The only thing this proves is that you can't upset the French government or they'll go on a fishing expedition through your office praying to find evidence of a crime.
  - robbru 8mo ago
    Grok makes it especially easy to do so.
    - grunder_advice 8mo ago
      What makes Grok special compared to random "AI gf generator 9001" which is hosted specifically with the intent of generating NSFW content?
      - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
        > What makes Grok special X. xAI isn’t being raided. X is. If Instagram bought a girlfriend generator and built it into its app, it would face liability as well.
      - plagiarist 8mo ago
        If AI GF Generator 9001 is producing unwilling deepfake pornography of real people, especially if of children, feel free to raid their offices as well.
  - NewsaHackO 8mo ago
    >Every AI system is capable of generating CSAM and deep fakes if requested by a savvy user. There is no way this is true, especially if the system is PaaS only. Additionally, the system should have a way to tell if someone is attempting to bypass their safety measures and act accordingly.
stickfigure 8mo ago
Honest question: What does it mean to "raid" the offices of a tech company? It's not like they have file cabinets with paper records. Are they just seizing employee workstations? Seems like you'd want to subpoena source code or gmail history or something like that. Not much interesting in an office these days.
- beart 8mo ago
  Offline syncing of outlook could reveal a lot of emails that would otherwise be on a foreign server. A lot of people save copies of documents locally as well.
  - cm2187 8mo ago
    Most enterprises have fully encrypted workstations, when they don't use VM where the desktop is just a thin client that doesn't store any data. So there should be really nothing of interest in the office itself.
    - direwolf20 8mo ago
      French has a password disclosure law.
      - cm2187 8mo ago
        Even if you seize the workstation and obtain the password, the files are unlikely to be stored locally.
- bsimpson 8mo ago
  I had the same thought - not just about raids, but about raiding a satellite office. This sounds like theater begging for headlines like this one.
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    They do what they can. They obviously can't raid the American office.
verdverm 8mo ago
France24 article on this: https://www.france24.com/en/france/20260203-paris-prosecutor-s-cybercrime-unit-raids-x-s-french-office https://www.france24.com/en/france/20260203-paris-prosecutor... lol, they summoned Elon for a hearing on 420 "Summons for voluntary interviews on April 20, 2026, in Paris have been sent to Mr. Elon Musk and Ms. Linda Yaccarino, in their capacity as de facto and de jure managers of the X platform at the time of the events,
- miltonlost 8mo ago
  I wonder how he'll try to get out of being summoned. Claim 4/20 is a holiday that he celebrates?
  - verdverm 8mo ago
    It's voluntary
    - dgxyz 8mo ago
      They'll make a judgement without him if he doesn't turn up.
      - pyrale 8mo ago
        An "audition en tant que témoin libre" is more or less the way for an investigation to give a chance to give their side of the story. Musk is not likely to be personally tried here.
  - flohofwoe 8mo ago
    > Claim 4/20 is a holiday that he celebrates? Given his recent "far right" bromance that's probably not a good idea ;)
    - verdverm 8mo ago
      It hadn't occurred to me that might be the reason they picked 420
r721 8mo ago
Another discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46872894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46872894
scotty79 8mo ago
Facebook offices should routinely raided for aiding and profitting from various scams propagated through ads on this platform.
- bluescrn 8mo ago
  Governments don't care about minor scams. Political speech against them, on the other hand...
- DaSHacka 8mo ago
  That would apply to any and all social media though
  - ToucanLoucan 8mo ago
    Sounds awesome, when do we start?
    - mekdoonggi 8mo ago
      Could not possibly agree more. When did we accept, "Users are doing the scamming, not the company" as an excuse? If it's your platform, you should be held responsible for all the illegal actions that it enabled. If a magazine published a page with a scam, they're responsible. Same should apply to social media. I literally don't care if it puts them out of business because the moderation would be too severe.
      - ToucanLoucan 8mo ago
        > When did we accept, "Users are doing the scamming, not the company" as an excuse? Section 230. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230 As always, Washington doing the hard work of making sure corpos never need to fix anything, ever.
        mekdoonggi 8mo ago
        A sincere thank you, for providing me with the exact section of law that I disagree with.
ta9000 8mo ago
Guess that will be a SpaceX problem soon enough. What a mess.
- nebula8804 8mo ago
  I wonder if the recent announcement spurred them into making a move now rather than later.
  - tyre 8mo ago
    The merger was most likely now because they have to do it before the IPO. After the IPO, there’s a whole process to force independent evaluation and negotiation between two boards / executives, which would be an absolute dumpster fire where Musk controls both. When they’re both private, fine, whatever.
    - justaboutanyone 8mo ago
      First thing a public spacex would want to do is sell off all the non-spacex crap
      - tyre 8mo ago
        A public SpaceX will still be run by Musk. A public SpaceX would have to sell assets like X for a huge loss given its debt load, which would also take a propaganda machine out of Musk’s hands. They’re stuck with those assets.
- mschuster91 8mo ago
  How was that move legal anyway? Like... a lot of people and governments gave Musk money to develop, build and launch rockets. And now he's using it to bail out his failing social media network and CSAM peddling AI service.
  - wmf 8mo ago
    Once he launched the rockets he can do whatever he wants with the profit. And he wants to train Grok.
piekvorst 8mo ago
Yet another nail
tomlockwood 8mo ago
Elon's in the files asking Epstein about "wild parties" and then doesn't seem to care about all this. Easy to draw a conclusion here.
- alex1138 8mo ago
  Elon is literally in the files, talking about going to the island. It's documented
  - chihuahua 8mo ago
    He was only going to the island to get rid of bots on Twitter. Just like OJ spent the rest of his life looking for the real killer.
    - alex1138 8mo ago
      It's timestamped like 2013, I think. Years before he bought Twitter (yes, I know you're joking)
      - andrewflnr 8mo ago
        He was planning way ahead, like a real genius.
  - yodsanklai 8mo ago
    Who knows who did what on this island, and I hope we'll figure it out. But in the meantime, going to this island or/and being friend with Epstein doesn't automatically make someone a pedo or rapist.
    - jjkaczor 8mo ago
      Neither does your wife divorcing you at about the same time things started to go through legal process... Oops... yeah, in retrospect it was even worse... no... you can and should be judged by the friends you keep and hang-out with... The same ones who seem to be circling the wagons with innocuous statements or attempts to find other scapegoats (DARVO)... hmm, what was that quote again: "We must all hang together or we will all hang separately"
TZubiri 8mo ago
Why would X have offices in France? I'm assuming it's just to hire French workers? Probably leftover from the Pre Acquisition era. Or is there any France-specific compliance that must be done in order to operate in that country?
- mike-the-mikado 8mo ago
  X makes its money selling advertising. France is the obvious place to have an office selling advertising to a large European French-speaking audience.
  - joshuaheard 8mo ago
    Yes, Paris is an international capital and centrally located for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Many tech companies have sales offices there.
tehjoker 8mo ago
It's cool that not every law enforcement agency in the world is under the complete thumb of U.S. based billionaires.
ChrisMarshallNY 8mo ago
> They have also summoned billionaire owner Elon Musk for questioning. Good luck with that...
- dathinab 8mo ago
  the thing is a lot of recent legal preceding surrounding X is about weather X fulfilled the legally required due diligence and if not what level of negligence we are speaking about and the things about negligence which caused harm to humans (instead of e.g. just financial harm) is that a) you can't opt out of responsibility, it doesn't matter what you put into your TOS or other contracts b) executives which are found responsible for the negligent action of a company can be hold _personally_ liable and independent of what X actually did Musk as highest level executive personal did 1) frequently did statements that imply gross negligence (to be clear that isn't necessary how X acted, which is the actual relevant part) 2) claimed that all major engineering decisions etc. are from him and no one else (because he love bragging about how good of an engineer he is) This means summoning him for questioning is legally speaking a must have independent of weather you expect him to show up or not. And he probably should take it serious, even if that just means he also could send a different higher level executive from X instead.
- sleepybrett 8mo ago
  I guess he could just never enter the EU ever again. Maybe he can buy Little St. James.
  - a_better_world 8mo ago
    and count on Trump to disrespect the extradition treaties. Which might be a reasonable expectation, but will have consequences, and Trump might not hold power forever.
    - sleepybrett 8mo ago
      I mean at this point, with a trillion dollars, apparently, why not just buy a small nation.
sleepybrett 8mo ago
I guess this means that building the neverending 'deepfake CSAM on demand machine' was a bad idea.
- sleepybrett 8mo ago
  I feel like whoever downvoted this comment should probably be on a watchlist of some kind.
jongjong 8mo ago
Once you've worked long enough in the software industry, you start to understand it's all just a fully planned economy.
lukasm 8mo ago
This is a show of resolve. "Uh guys, little heads up: there are some agents of federal law enforcement raiding the premises, so if you see that. That’s what that is."
hereme888 8mo ago
[flagged]
justaboutanyone 8mo ago
This sort of thing will be great for the SpaceX IPO :/
- stubish 8mo ago
  Especially if contracts with SpaceX start being torn up because the various ongoing investigations and prosecutions of xAI are now ongoing investigations and prosecutions of SpaceX. And next new lawsuits for creating this conflict of interest by merger.
darepublic 8mo ago
I remember encountering questionable hentai material (by accident) back in the Twitter days. But back then twitter was a leftist darling
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  Hentai has different legal status to realistic pictures of real people
- nemomarx 8mo ago
  I think there's a difference between "user uploaded material isn't properly moderated" and "the sites own chatbot generates porn on request based on images of women who didn't agree to it", no?
  - nailer 8mo ago
    But it doesn’t. Group has always had Aggressive filters on sexual content just like every other generative AI tool. People who have found exploits, just like other generative AI tool.
  - tick_tock_tick 8mo ago
    Not really?
- techblueberry 8mo ago
  Did you report it or just let it continue doing harm?
- fumar 8mo ago
  Define leftist for back in the twitter days? I used twitter early in release. Don’t recall it being a faction specific platform.
  - reverius42 8mo ago
    I think they're using it in the American sense, which means "anywhere in the political spectrum of the leftmost 60% of the population".
mhh__ 8mo ago
[flagged]
isodev 8mo ago
Good and honestly it’s high time. There used to be a time when we could give corps the benefit of the doubt but that time is clearly over. Beyond the CSAM, X is a cesspool of misinformation and generally the worst examples of humanity.
- mekdoonggi 8mo ago
  I don't know how we even allowed these companies to not be responsible for everything on their platform. The entirety of the social media platform is based on the idea that the company isn't responsible for what the users post, which is just wrong. If you own a magazine, you should be held responsible for everything published. You shouldn't be allowed to profit from publishing anything, then hide behind "the users did it, not us". And in this case, Elon should be held responsible for every single image of CSAM published on X. Same with Zuck. Same with Truth Social, whatever you want.
miki123211 8mo ago
This vindicates the pro-AI censorship crowd I guess. It definitely makes it clear what is expected of AI companies. Your users aren't responsible for what they use your model for, you are, so you'd better make sure your model can't ever be used for anything nefarious. If you can't do that without keeping the model closed and verifying everyone's identities... well, that's good for your profits I guess.
- culi 8mo ago
  It's not really different from how we treat any other platform that can host CSAM. I guess the main difference is that it's being "made" instead of simply "distributed" here
  - toxik 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - blipvert 8mo ago
      Pro-tip: if you are actively assisting someone in doing illegal things then you are an accomplice.
    - krig 8mo ago
      Those images are generated from a training set, and it is already well known and reported that those training sets contain _real_ CSAM, real violence, real abuse. That "generated" face of a child is based on real images of real children.
      - pavlov 8mo ago
        Indeed, a Stanford study from a few years back showed that the image data sets used by essentially everybody contain CSAM. Everybody else has teams building guardrails to mitigate this fundamental existential horror of these models. Musk fired all the safety people and decided to go all in on “adult” content.
utopiah 8mo ago
To people claiming a physical raid is pointless from the point of gathering data : - you are thinking about a company doing good things the right way. You are thinking about a company abiding by the law, storing data on its own server, having good practices, etc. The moment a company starts to do dubious stuff then good practices start to go out the window. People write email with cryptic analogies, people start deleting emails, ... then as the circumvention become more numerous and complex, there needs to still be a trail in order to remain understandable. That trail will be in written form somehow and that must be hidden. It might be paper, it might be shadow IT but the point is that if you are not just forgetting to keep track of coffee pods at the social corner, you will leave traces. So yes, raids do make sense BECAUSE it's about recurring complex activities that are just too hard to keep in the mind of one single individual over long periods of time.
- tick_tock_tick 8mo ago
  No need to be coy the raid exists because it's a way to punish the company without proving anything. They have zero intention of getting even the slightest bit of valuable data related to Grok from this.
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    What's your evidence?
  - fyredge 8mo ago
    Unlike the current American administration who condones raids on homes without warrants and justifies violence with lies, this France raid follows something called rule of law. So no, don't be coy and pretend that all governments are like American institutions.
    - Levitz 8mo ago
      >Unlike the current American administration who condones raids on homes without warrants and justifies violence with lies, this France raid follows something called rule of law. Iffy on that front, actually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel_Durov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...
touwer 8mo ago
[flagged]
Animats 8mo ago
One of the charges is "fraudulent data extraction by an organised group." That's going to affect the entire social media industry if applied broadly.
- muyuu 8mo ago
  Frankly it sounds to me like a "show me the man and I'll show you the crime" kind of operation. France and the UK, and judging by yesterday's speech by the PM of Spain maybe the whole EU might be looking to do what China and Russia did earlier on and start cracking down on foreign social media by making it impossible to operate without total alignment with their vision and not just their (new) rules. Together with a push for local alternatives, that currently don't seem to be there, it may spell the end for a big chunk of the Global social network landscape. I still believe that the EU and aligned countries would rather have America to agree to much tighter speech controls, digital ID, ToS-based speech codes as apparently US Democrats partly or totally agree to. But if they have workable alternatives they will deal with them from a different position.
  - Palmik 8mo ago
    > EU might be looking to do what China and Russia did earlier on and start cracking down on foreign social media For some reason you forgot to mention "Like the US did with TikTok".
    - muyuu 8mo ago
      that was decades later, but yea I don't think for a second that was justifiable - not even considering that China had completely closed shop for America decades earlier and this was a 1-way openness relationship for a long time; they could have sold this as a reciprocity issue but they didn't esp. when America already controls the main outlets through Android Play Store and Apple Store, and yep, they have proven to control them not just happen to host them as a country arguably America did have valid security concerns with Huawei though, but if those are the rules then you cannot complain later on
    - junto 8mo ago
mnewme 8mo ago
Good one. No platform ever should allow CSAM content. And the fact that they didn’t even care and haven’t want to spend money for implementing guardrails or moderation is deeply concerning. This has imho nothing to do with model censorship, but everything with allowing that kind of content on a platform
- exodust 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - cess11 8mo ago
    [flagged]
  - myrmidon 8mo ago
    There are multiple valid reasons to fight realistic computer-generated CSAM content. Uncontrolled profileration of AI-CSAM makes detection of "genuine" data much harder, prosecution of perpetrators more difficult and specifically in many of the grok cases it harms young victims that were used as templates for the material. Content is unacceptable if its proliferation causes sufficient harm, and this is arguably the case here.
    - Eisenstein 8mo ago
      > Uncontrolled profileration of AI-CSAM makes detection of "genuine" data much harder I don't follow. If the prosecutor can't find evidence of a crime and a person is not charged, that is considered harmful? As such the 5th amendment would fall under the same category and so would encryption. Making law enforcement have to work harder to find evidence of a crime cannot be criminalized unless you can come up with a reason why the actions themselves deserve to be criminalized. > specifically in many of the grok cases it harms young victims that were used as templates for the material. What is the criteria for this? If something is suitably transformed such that the original model for it is not discernable or identifiable, how can it harm them? Do not take these as an argument against the idea you are arguing for, but as rebuttals against arguments that are not convincing, or if they were, would be terrible if applied generally.
exodust 8mo ago
[flagged]
- joe_mamba 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - ilogik 8mo ago
    The UK is also opening investigations into the Esptein stuff. https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/starmers-government-aids-police-probe-into-mandelsons-epstein-leaks-2026-02-03/ https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/starmers-government-aids-po... Unlike the US administration which seems to be fine with what epstein and X are doing
    - joe_mamba 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      - SiempreViernes 8mo ago
        What's this comment about? Do you think no other CSAM distribution should be investigated until the stuff in Epstein files is sorted?
      - owebmaster 8mo ago
        [flagged]
    - GordonS 8mo ago
      Except Starmer is making sure that the "investigation" is hobbled - anything seemed important to "national security" will be excluded! The UK's "investigation" is a farce.
  - amelius 8mo ago
    I think the reasoning is that the AI contributes to more epsteins. In some way.
csmpltn 8mo ago
[flagged]
- mortarion 8mo ago
  Maybe you should look up child pornography laws in Europe. In Sweden, the mere act of scrolling by an image depicting (real or not) a child in a sexual position, and having it stored in the browser cache, is a crime with up to 2 years of prison time.
  - csmpltn 8mo ago
    How does that negate my initial comment?
ljsprague 8mo ago
[flagged]
- tene80i 8mo ago
  I'm sure it's comforting to believe that people you disagree with do so for silly reasons, but many people will support this just because we like the rule of law.
dominicrose 8mo ago
A Russian in a French prison says my country isn't free. Well, let that message spread to other criminals. You're not welcome in France.
blitzar 8mo ago
[flagged]
tokai 8mo ago
Good old HN. Users losing their collective minds over rule of law and CSAM being bad.
- y-curious 8mo ago
  Found the guy who supports digital ID and involuntary phone database scanning
  - tokai 8mo ago
    Found the cheese pizza enjoyer.
    - ddtaylor 8mo ago
      HN is capable of a better discussion without personal attacks.
  - ddtaylor 8mo ago
    HN is capable of a better discussion without personal attacks.
- code_for_monkey 8mo ago
  extremely cursed userbase sometimes
- hearsathought 8mo ago
  > CSAM being bad. Agreed. It's why it's difficult to support France who has sheltered Roman Polanski for decades. It's strange how people like you only think it's bad when it suits your political agenda.
krautburglar 8mo ago
Raid all of them. Raid Google. Raid Facebook. Raid Apple. Raid Microsoft. Big tech has gotten away with everything from fraud[0] to murder[1] for decades. Black outfits. Rappel lines. Automatics. Touch that server Prakesh, and you won't live to touch another. [0] https://nypost.com/2025/12/15/business/facebook-most-cited-in-online-complaints-for-hosting-scam-ads-that-cost-users-billions-watchdog/ https://nypost.com/2025/12/15/business/facebook-most-cited-i... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suchir_Balaji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suchir_Balaji
patrick451 8mo ago
Until the EU gets their act together on free speech, it's high time the united states hits them with aggressive economic sanctions.
- poseva 8mo ago
  Is this sarcasm ? because sounds like sarcasm. If Grok generating naked images of children is your ideea of free speech no wonder nobody takes a stand against Trump and Co., you somehow managed turn your common sense to dust...
- causalscience 8mo ago
  [dead]
- hearsathought 8mo ago
  Europe/EU should have whatever free speech they want. But we should annex all european controlled territory in the western hemisphere. The amount of territory that european empires still control in this hemisphere is alarming and frankly embarrassing. From greenland to "french" guyana to the falklands, it should all be seized.
- coffeebeqn 8mo ago
  https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/freedom-of-expression-index?globe=1&globeRotation=43.98%2C12.71&globeZoom=2.5 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/freedom-of-expression-ind...
- drawfloat 8mo ago
  Settings aside this is about CSAM, the US is the only one of the two to shut down a foreign social network because it dislikes what was said on it. The US doesn't get to play that card anymore.
voidUpdate 8mo ago
> "the only country in the world that is criminally persecuting all social networks that give people some degree of freedom" Sounds like he's never been to Russia. Which is weird, given that he's Russian
- arielcostas 8mo ago
  Yeah, and in his mind the only social networks that exist are Telegram and Twitter. Mastodon doesn't exist, bluesky doesn't either, rr any of Meta's products (including Threads, direct competitor to Twitter with seemingly more bots and propaganda)
- fer 8mo ago
  Yeah, as someone who's been to Russia pre-war, and has worked and befriended Russians, the beam in the eye is quite strong in many. It's striking because the social contract there is basically that you're left alone as long as you don't become a thorn of the power, social network-mediated or not, and I'm not even talking about Putin and his entourage, but local administration in a remote village too. Zvyagintsev portrays it royally in Leviathan, as it's been portrayed by Dostoyevsky and Tosltoy before. My most recent case: I went on holiday to a resort in Turkey, numerous Russians, families, retired, etc. I don't pass as a Russian-speaker (but I understand quite well) and once they hear me talking other unrelated language they naturally start to speak more freely in front of me (i.e. more liberal use of swearing, and even slurs if no other Russians are around). While sunbathing, or at the restaurant, or the pool, they were talking about daily, mundane things, same in the restaurant, etc. But when floating in pairs 20-30m from the shore? Politics.
code_for_monkey 8mo ago
lord some of the people on this site need their hard drives searched.
- buellerbueller 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - goodolddays9090 8mo ago
    [dead]
  - code_for_monkey 8mo ago
    its this elon cult, its "anything he does has to be defended" so you end up contorting yourself into defending actual csam!
  - krjgmsmsn 8mo ago
    It might be related to that the bitcoin metadata contains csam, I.e. if you have a full ledger stored you’re technically a criminal.
- ddtaylor 8mo ago
  I was once closer to s free speech absolutist, but this has always been where that discussion leads. The lines were clearer decades ago because someone who interacted with CSAM was closely involved and their harm was easier to see in totality. Over time the gap between people who caused that harm and those that think they are not hurting anyone has widened. With AI it caused many of those that thought it was acceptable to consume illegal content to put another layer between their victims and offload the moral baggage.
- throwaway290 8mo ago
  To me it became clear when people here rejected any compromises on privacy and anonymous on device scanning of messages/data. Not because they rejected it but how they rejected it. People here didn't say "yeah it's a real evil problem and e2e tech that we build makes it almost impossible to catch and helps it scale, so let's find the right tradeoff that minimizes privacy invasion". No. People here just mocked "think of the children" and said something along the lines of no amount of suffering can make any restriction to privacy be acceptable. The fact that 99% of our life is literally compromising our freedom for others they don't care. To buellerbueller's killed comment, I totally feel it. it was a shocker when it turned out many of my fellow Russians got no problem with Putin's war and I bet that's what half of USA feels.
wnevets 8mo ago
The man that is friends with a bunch of pedophiles owns a website that is becoming known for generating CSAM? What are the chances?
devwastaken 8mo ago
E.U is replacing their citizens with unvetted violent criminals. They have to vote for whoever gives them free stuff. The powers doing this are upset a company in the U.S allows their citizens to protest it.
- mekdoonggi 8mo ago
  Read that on X?
  - Pedro_Ribeiro 8mo ago
    Do you honestly not believe it is likely that EU is importing votes? Also, haven't you seen the general push towards censorship, attempts to ban VPNs, and all the other shenanigans happening in the EU? Do you believe this is disconnected from the legal attempts on Twitter and Telegram? Is it really a conspiracy theory at this point? Politicians do all kinds of evil shit, but these playbook tactics are where you draw the line? I'm European and live here, before you say I'm getting these takes on X.
    - enether 8mo ago
      +1 from an European, it's beyond obvious and I don't understand why people are letting {politics, mainstream media painting of X} shape their belief on these extremely pressing and important issues.
Havoc 8mo ago
The lack of legal/regulatory reaction US side on CSAM is pretty bewildering. And ominously mirrors the Epstein saga - other countries seem to be moving fast while US seems to be trying very hard to not move at all

596 points by vikaveri 8mo ago

pogue 8mo ago

Finally, someone is taking action against the CSAM machine operating seemingly without penalty.

chrisjj 8mo ago
[flagged]
- secretsatan 8mo ago
  It doesn't mention grok?
  - chrisjj 8mo ago
    Sure does. Twice. E.g. Musk's social media platform has recently been subject to intense scrutiny over sexualised images generated and edited on the site using its AI tool Grok.
    - mfru 8mo ago
      CTRL-F "grok": 0/0 found
      - lawn 8mo ago
        I found 8 mentions.
      - chrisjj 8mo ago
        You're using an "AI" browser? :)
- mortarion 8mo ago
  CSAM does not have a universal definition. In Sweden for instance, CSAM is any image of an underage subject (real or realistic digital) designed to evoke a sexual response. If you take a picture of a 14 year old girl (age of consent is 15) and use Grok to give her bikini, or make her topless, then you are most definately producing and possessing CSAM. No abuse of a real minor is needed.
  - worthless-trash 8mo ago
    As good as Australia's little boobie laws.
    - chrisjj 8mo ago
      https://www.theregister.com/2010/01/28/australian_censors/ https://www.theregister.com/2010/01/28/australian_censors/
  - chrisjj 8mo ago
    > CSAM does not have a universal definition. Strange that there was no disagreement before "AI", right? Yet now we have a clutch of new "definitions" all of which dilute and weaken the meaning. > In Sweden for instance, CSAM is any image of an underage subject (real or realistic digital) designed to evoke a sexual response. No corroboration found on web. Quite the contrary, in fact: "Sweden does not have a legislative definition of child sexual abuse material (CSAM)" https://rm.coe.int/factsheet-sweden-the-protection-of-children-against-sexual-exploitatio/1680acdef9 https://rm.coe.int/factsheet-sweden-the-protection-of-childr... > If you take a picture of a 14 year old girl (age of consent is 15) and use Grok to give her bikini, or make her topless, then you are most definately producing and possessing CSAM. > No abuse of a real minor is needed. Even the Google "AI" knows better than that. CSAM "is considered a record of a crime, emphasizing that its existence represents the abuse of a child." Putting a bikini on a photo of a child may be distasteful abuse of a photo, but it is not abuse of a child - in any current law.
    - lava_pidgeon 8mo ago
      " Strange that there was no disagreement before "AI", right? Yet now we have a clutch of new "definitions" all of which dilute and weaken the meaning. " Are you from Sweden? Why do you think the definition was clear across the world and not changed "before AI"? Or is it some USDefaultism where Americans assume their definition was universal?
- moolcool 8mo ago
  Are you implying that it's not abuse to "undress" a child using AI? You should realize that children have committed suicide before because AI deepfakes of themselves have been spread around schools. Just because these images are "fake" doesn't mean they're not abuse, and that there aren't real victims.
  - chrisjj 8mo ago
    > Are you implying that it's not abuse to "undress" a child using AI? Not at all. I am saying just it is not CSAM. > You should realize that children have committed suicide before because AI deepfakes of themselves have been spread around schools. Its terrible. And when "AI"s are found spreading deepfakes around schools, do let us know.
    - mrtksn 8mo ago
      CSAM: Child Sexual Abuse Material. When you undress a child with AI, especially publicly on Twitter or privately through DM, that child is abused using the material the AI generated. Therefore CSAM.
      - chrisjj 8mo ago
        > When you undress a child with AI, I guess you mean pasting a naked body on a photo of a child. > especially publicly on Twitter or privately through DM, that child is abused using the material the AI generated. In which country is that? Here in UK, I've never heard of anyone jailed for doing that. Whereas many are for making actual child sexual abuse material.
    - enaaem 8mo ago
      [flagged]
tjpnz 8mo ago
It's also a massive problem on Meta. Hopefully this action isn't just a one-off.
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  Does Meta publish it themselves or is it user–generated?

robtherobber 8mo ago

> The prosecutor's office also said it was leaving X and would communicate on LinkedIn and Instagram from now on. I mean, perhaps it's time to completely drop these US-owned, closed-source, algo-driven controversial platforms, and start treating the communication with the public that funds your existence in different terms. The goal should be to reach as many people, of course, but also to ensure that the method and medium of communication is in the interest of the public at large.

spacecadet 8mo ago
This. What a joke. Im still waiting on my tax refund from NYC for plastering "twitter" stickers on every publicly funded vehicle.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
valar_m 8mo ago
>The goal should be to reach as many people, of course, but also to ensure that the method and medium of communication is in the interest of the public at large. Who decides what communication is in the interest of the public at large? The Trump administration?
- robtherobber 8mo ago
  You appear to have posted a bit of a loaded question here, apologies if I'm misinterpreting your comment. It is, of course, the public that should decide what communication is of public interest, at least in a democracy operating optimally. I suppose the answer, if we're serious about it, is somewhat more nuanced. To begin, public administrations should not get to unilaterally define "the public interest" in their communication, nor should private platforms for that matter. Assuming we're still talking about a democracy, the decision-making should be democratically via a combination of law + rights + accountable institutions + public scrutiny, with implementation constraints that maximise reach, accessibility, auditability, and independence from private gatekeepers. The last bit is rather relevant, because the private sector's interests and the citizen's interests are nearly always at odds in any modern society, hence the state's roles as rule-setter (via democratic processes) and arbiter. Happy to get into further detail regarding the actual processes involved, if you're genuinely interested. That aside - there are two separate problems that often get conflated when we talk about these platforms: - one is reach: people are on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, so publishing there increases distribution; public institutions should be interested in reaching as many citizens as possible with their comms; - the other one is dependency: if those become the primary or exclusive channels, the state's relationship with citizens becomes contingent on private moderation, ranking algorithms, account lockouts, paywalls, data extraction, and opaque rule changes. That is entirely and dangerously misaligned with democratic accountability. A potential middle position could be ti use commercial social platforms as secondary distribution instead of the authoritative channel, which in reality is often the case. However, due to the way societies work and how individuals operate within them, the public won't actually come across the information until it's distributed on the most popular platforms. Which is why some argue that they should be treated as public utilities since dominant communications infrastructure has quasi-public function (rest assured, I won't open that can of worms right now). Politics is messy in practice, as all balancing acts are - a normal price to pay for any democratic society, I'd say. Mix that with technology, social psychology and philosophies of liberty, rights, and wellbeing, and you have a proper head-scratcher on your hands. We've already done a lot to balance these, for sure, but we're not there yet and it's a dynamic, developing field that presents new challenges.

vessenes 8mo ago

Interesting. This is basically the second enforcement on speech / images that France has done - first was Pavel Durov @ Telegram. He eventually made changes in Telegram's moderation infrastructure and I think was allowed to leave France sometime last year. I don't love heavy-handed enforcement on speech issues, but I do really like a heterogenous cultural situation, so I think it's interesting and probably to the overall good to have a country pushing on these matters very hard, just as a matter of keeping a diverse set of global standards, something that adds cultural resilience for humanity. linkedin is not a replacement for twitter, though. I'm curious if they'll come back post-settlement.

derrida 8mo ago
I wouldn't equate the two. There's someone who was being held responsible for what was in encrypted chats. Then there's someone who published depictions of sexual abuse and minors. Worlds apart.
- cbeach 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - techblueberry 8mo ago
    In November 2012, Epstein sent Musk an email asking “how many people will you be for the heli to island”. “Probably just Talulah and me. What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” Musk replied, in an apparent reference to his former wife Talulah Riley. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/30/elon-musk-epstein-files-island-visits https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/30/elon-musk... I think there's just as much evidence Clinton did as Musk. Gates on the other hand.
    - antonymoose 8mo ago

pu_pe 8mo ago

I suppose those are the offices from SpaceX now that they merged.

omnimus 8mo ago
So France is raiding offices of US military contractor?
- mkjs 8mo ago
  How is that relevant? Are you implying that being a US military contractor should make you immune to the laws of other countries that you operate in? The onus is on the contractor to make sure any classified information is kept securely. If by raiding an office in France a bunch of US military secrets are found, it would suggest the company is not fit to have those kind of contracts.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- fanatic2pope 8mo ago
  Even if it is, being affiliated with the US military doesn't make you immune to local laws. https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/us-marines-okinawa-japan-sexual-assualt-b2675964.html https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/us...
- hermanzegerman 8mo ago
  I know it's hard to grasp for you. But in France, french laws and jurisdiction applies, not those of the United States
  - watwut 8mo ago
    To be fair, it is common confusion. In other comments, you see people arguing by US constitution.
  - omnimus 8mo ago
    It's not at all hard to grasp for me. I think it's great actually.

afavour 8mo ago

I’m sure Musk is going to say this is about free speech in an attempt to gin up his supporters. It isn’t. It’s about generating and distributing non consensual sexual imagery, including of minors. And, when notified, doing nothing about it. If anything it should be an embarrassment that France are the only ones doing this. (it’ll be interesting to see if this discussion is allowed on HN. Almost every other discussion on this topic has been flagged…)

cbeach 8mo ago
> when notified, doing nothing about it When notified, he immediately: * "implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing" - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce8gz8g2qnlo * locked image generation down to paid accounts only (i.e. those individuals that can be identified via their payment details). Have the other AI companies followed suit? They were also allowing users to undress real people, but it seems the media is ignoring that and focussing their ire only on Musk's companies...
- derrida 8mo ago
  The other LLMs probably don't have the training data in the first place.
  - chrisjj 8mo ago
    Er... "Study uncovers presence of CSAM in popular AI training dataset" https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/20/csam_laion_dataset/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/20/csam_laion_dataset/.
- afavour 8mo ago
  You and I must have different definitions of the word “immediately”. The article you posted is from January 15th. Here is a story from January 2nd: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98p1r4e6m8o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98p1r4e6m8o > Have the other AI companies followed suit? They were also allowing users to undress real people No they weren’t? There were numerous examples of people feeding the same prompts to different AIs and having their requests refused. Not to mention, X was also publicly distributing that material, something other AI companies were not doing. Which is an entirely different legal liability.

techblueberry 8mo ago

I'm not saying I'm entirely against this, but just out of curiosity, what do they hope to find in a raid of the french offices, a folder labeled "Grok's CSAM Plan"?

afavour 8mo ago
It was known that Grok was generating these images long before any action was taken. I imagine they’ll be looking for internal communications on what they were doing, or deciding not to do, doing during that time.
Mordisquitos 8mo ago
What do they hope to find, specifically? Who knows, but maybe the prosecutors have a better awareness of specifics than us HN commenters who have not been involved in the investigation. What may they find, hypothetically? Who knows, but maybe an internal email saying, for instance, 'Management says keep the nude photo functionality, just hide it behind a feature flag', or maybe 'Great idea to keep a backup of the images, but must cover our tracks', or perhaps 'Elon says no action on Grok nude images, we are officially unaware anything is happening.'
- cwillu 8mo ago
  Or “regulators don't understand the technology; short of turning it off entirely, there's nothing we can do to prevent it entirely, and the costs involved in attempting to reduce it are much greater than the likely fine, especially given that we're likely to receive such a fine anyway.”
  - pirates 8mo ago
    They could shut it off out of a sense of decency and respect, wtf kind of defense is this?
    - cwillu 8mo ago
      You appear to have lost the thread (or maybe you're replying to things directly from the newcomments feed? If so, please stop it.), we're talking about what sort of incriminating written statements the raid might hope to discover.

Altern4tiveAcc 8mo ago

> Prosecutors say they are now investigating whether X has broken the law across multiple areas. This step could come before a police raid. This looks like plain political pressure. No lives were saved, and no crime was prevented by harassing local workers.

moolcool 8mo ago
> This looks like plain political pressure. No lives were saved, and no crime was prevented by harassing local workers. The company made and released a tool with seemingly no guard-rails, which was used en masse to generate deepfakes and child pornography.
- gulfofamerica 8mo ago
  [dead]
- ChrisGreenHeur 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - KaiserPro 8mo ago
    Not really, they put a shit ton of effort in to make sure you can't create any kind of nude/suggestive pictures of anyone. I imagine they have strict controls on making images of children, but I don't feel inclined to find out.
    - ChrisGreenHeur 8mo ago
      you understand that the brush tool in photoshop exists?
- trhway 8mo ago
  Internet routers, network cards, the computers, OS and various application software have no guardrails and is used for all the nefarious things. Why those companies aren't raided?

SilverElfin 8mo ago

[flagged]

Bender 8mo ago
In my opinion I think the reason they raided the offices for CSAM would be there are laws on the books for CSAM and not for social manipulation. If people could be jailed for manipulation there would be no social media platforms, lobbyists, political campaign groups or advertisements. People are already being manipulated by AI. On a related note given AI is just a tool and requires someone to tell it to make CSAM I think they will have to prove intent possibly by grabbing chat logs, emails and other internal communications but I know very little about French law or international law.
- SilverElfin 8mo ago
  Given America passed PAFACA (intended to ban TikTok, which Trump instead put in hands of his friends), I would think Europe would also have a similar law. Is that not the case?
  - Bender 8mo ago
    Are you talking about this [1]? I don't know the answer to your question whether or not the EU has the same policy. That is talking about control by a foreign adversary. I think that would delve into whether or not the USA would be considered a foreign adversary to France. I was under the impression we were allies since like the 1800s or so despite some little tiffs now and again. [1] - https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521 https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521
    - EngineerUSA 8mo ago
      [flagged]
    - direwolf20 8mo ago
      EngineerUSA needs to vastly change his tone to avoid being flagged. I vouched it because it's broadly true but the wording could be a LOT better.

etchalon 8mo ago

[flagged]

lingrush4 8mo ago
Every AI system is capable of generating CSAM and deep fakes if requested by a savvy user. The only thing this proves is that you can't upset the French government or they'll go on a fishing expedition through your office praying to find evidence of a crime.
- robbru 8mo ago
  Grok makes it especially easy to do so.
  - grunder_advice 8mo ago
    What makes Grok special compared to random "AI gf generator 9001" which is hosted specifically with the intent of generating NSFW content?
    - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
      > What makes Grok special X. xAI isn’t being raided. X is. If Instagram bought a girlfriend generator and built it into its app, it would face liability as well.
    - plagiarist 8mo ago
      If AI GF Generator 9001 is producing unwilling deepfake pornography of real people, especially if of children, feel free to raid their offices as well.
- NewsaHackO 8mo ago
  >Every AI system is capable of generating CSAM and deep fakes if requested by a savvy user. There is no way this is true, especially if the system is PaaS only. Additionally, the system should have a way to tell if someone is attempting to bypass their safety measures and act accordingly.

stickfigure 8mo ago

Honest question: What does it mean to "raid" the offices of a tech company? It's not like they have file cabinets with paper records. Are they just seizing employee workstations? Seems like you'd want to subpoena source code or gmail history or something like that. Not much interesting in an office these days.

beart 8mo ago
Offline syncing of outlook could reveal a lot of emails that would otherwise be on a foreign server. A lot of people save copies of documents locally as well.
- cm2187 8mo ago
  Most enterprises have fully encrypted workstations, when they don't use VM where the desktop is just a thin client that doesn't store any data. So there should be really nothing of interest in the office itself.
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    French has a password disclosure law.
    - cm2187 8mo ago
      Even if you seize the workstation and obtain the password, the files are unlikely to be stored locally.
bsimpson 8mo ago
I had the same thought - not just about raids, but about raiding a satellite office. This sounds like theater begging for headlines like this one.
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  They do what they can. They obviously can't raid the American office.

verdverm 8mo ago

France24 article on this: https://www.france24.com/en/france/20260203-paris-prosecutor-s-cybercrime-unit-raids-x-s-french-office https://www.france24.com/en/france/20260203-paris-prosecutor... lol, they summoned Elon for a hearing on 420 "Summons for voluntary interviews on April 20, 2026, in Paris have been sent to Mr. Elon Musk and Ms. Linda Yaccarino, in their capacity as de facto and de jure managers of the X platform at the time of the events,

miltonlost 8mo ago
I wonder how he'll try to get out of being summoned. Claim 4/20 is a holiday that he celebrates?
- verdverm 8mo ago
  It's voluntary
  - dgxyz 8mo ago
    They'll make a judgement without him if he doesn't turn up.
    - pyrale 8mo ago
      An "audition en tant que témoin libre" is more or less the way for an investigation to give a chance to give their side of the story. Musk is not likely to be personally tried here.
- flohofwoe 8mo ago
  > Claim 4/20 is a holiday that he celebrates? Given his recent "far right" bromance that's probably not a good idea ;)
  - verdverm 8mo ago
    It hadn't occurred to me that might be the reason they picked 420

r721 8mo ago

Another discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46872894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46872894

scotty79 8mo ago

Facebook offices should routinely raided for aiding and profitting from various scams propagated through ads on this platform.

bluescrn 8mo ago
Governments don't care about minor scams. Political speech against them, on the other hand...
DaSHacka 8mo ago
That would apply to any and all social media though
- ToucanLoucan 8mo ago
  Sounds awesome, when do we start?
  - mekdoonggi 8mo ago
    Could not possibly agree more. When did we accept, "Users are doing the scamming, not the company" as an excuse? If it's your platform, you should be held responsible for all the illegal actions that it enabled. If a magazine published a page with a scam, they're responsible. Same should apply to social media. I literally don't care if it puts them out of business because the moderation would be too severe.
    - ToucanLoucan 8mo ago
      > When did we accept, "Users are doing the scamming, not the company" as an excuse? Section 230. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230 As always, Washington doing the hard work of making sure corpos never need to fix anything, ever.
      - mekdoonggi 8mo ago
        A sincere thank you, for providing me with the exact section of law that I disagree with.

ta9000 8mo ago

Guess that will be a SpaceX problem soon enough. What a mess.

nebula8804 8mo ago
I wonder if the recent announcement spurred them into making a move now rather than later.
- tyre 8mo ago
  The merger was most likely now because they have to do it before the IPO. After the IPO, there’s a whole process to force independent evaluation and negotiation between two boards / executives, which would be an absolute dumpster fire where Musk controls both. When they’re both private, fine, whatever.
  - justaboutanyone 8mo ago
    First thing a public spacex would want to do is sell off all the non-spacex crap
    - tyre 8mo ago
      A public SpaceX will still be run by Musk. A public SpaceX would have to sell assets like X for a huge loss given its debt load, which would also take a propaganda machine out of Musk’s hands. They’re stuck with those assets.
mschuster91 8mo ago
How was that move legal anyway? Like... a lot of people and governments gave Musk money to develop, build and launch rockets. And now he's using it to bail out his failing social media network and CSAM peddling AI service.
- wmf 8mo ago
  Once he launched the rockets he can do whatever he wants with the profit. And he wants to train Grok.

piekvorst 8mo ago

Yet another nail

tomlockwood 8mo ago

Elon's in the files asking Epstein about "wild parties" and then doesn't seem to care about all this. Easy to draw a conclusion here.

alex1138 8mo ago
Elon is literally in the files, talking about going to the island. It's documented
- chihuahua 8mo ago
  He was only going to the island to get rid of bots on Twitter. Just like OJ spent the rest of his life looking for the real killer.
  - alex1138 8mo ago
    It's timestamped like 2013, I think. Years before he bought Twitter (yes, I know you're joking)
    - andrewflnr 8mo ago
      He was planning way ahead, like a real genius.
- yodsanklai 8mo ago
  Who knows who did what on this island, and I hope we'll figure it out. But in the meantime, going to this island or/and being friend with Epstein doesn't automatically make someone a pedo or rapist.
  - jjkaczor 8mo ago
    Neither does your wife divorcing you at about the same time things started to go through legal process... Oops... yeah, in retrospect it was even worse... no... you can and should be judged by the friends you keep and hang-out with... The same ones who seem to be circling the wagons with innocuous statements or attempts to find other scapegoats (DARVO)... hmm, what was that quote again: "We must all hang together or we will all hang separately"

TZubiri 8mo ago

Why would X have offices in France? I'm assuming it's just to hire French workers? Probably leftover from the Pre Acquisition era. Or is there any France-specific compliance that must be done in order to operate in that country?

mike-the-mikado 8mo ago
X makes its money selling advertising. France is the obvious place to have an office selling advertising to a large European French-speaking audience.
- joshuaheard 8mo ago
  Yes, Paris is an international capital and centrally located for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Many tech companies have sales offices there.

tehjoker 8mo ago

It's cool that not every law enforcement agency in the world is under the complete thumb of U.S. based billionaires.

ChrisMarshallNY 8mo ago

> They have also summoned billionaire owner Elon Musk for questioning. Good luck with that...

dathinab 8mo ago
the thing is a lot of recent legal preceding surrounding X is about weather X fulfilled the legally required due diligence and if not what level of negligence we are speaking about and the things about negligence which caused harm to humans (instead of e.g. just financial harm) is that a) you can't opt out of responsibility, it doesn't matter what you put into your TOS or other contracts b) executives which are found responsible for the negligent action of a company can be hold _personally_ liable and independent of what X actually did Musk as highest level executive personal did 1) frequently did statements that imply gross negligence (to be clear that isn't necessary how X acted, which is the actual relevant part) 2) claimed that all major engineering decisions etc. are from him and no one else (because he love bragging about how good of an engineer he is) This means summoning him for questioning is legally speaking a must have independent of weather you expect him to show up or not. And he probably should take it serious, even if that just means he also could send a different higher level executive from X instead.
sleepybrett 8mo ago
I guess he could just never enter the EU ever again. Maybe he can buy Little St. James.
- a_better_world 8mo ago
  and count on Trump to disrespect the extradition treaties. Which might be a reasonable expectation, but will have consequences, and Trump might not hold power forever.
  - sleepybrett 8mo ago
    I mean at this point, with a trillion dollars, apparently, why not just buy a small nation.

sleepybrett 8mo ago

I guess this means that building the neverending 'deepfake CSAM on demand machine' was a bad idea.

sleepybrett 8mo ago
I feel like whoever downvoted this comment should probably be on a watchlist of some kind.

jongjong 8mo ago

Once you've worked long enough in the software industry, you start to understand it's all just a fully planned economy.

lukasm 8mo ago

This is a show of resolve. "Uh guys, little heads up: there are some agents of federal law enforcement raiding the premises, so if you see that. That’s what that is."

hereme888 8mo ago

[flagged]

justaboutanyone 8mo ago

This sort of thing will be great for the SpaceX IPO :/

stubish 8mo ago
Especially if contracts with SpaceX start being torn up because the various ongoing investigations and prosecutions of xAI are now ongoing investigations and prosecutions of SpaceX. And next new lawsuits for creating this conflict of interest by merger.

darepublic 8mo ago

I remember encountering questionable hentai material (by accident) back in the Twitter days. But back then twitter was a leftist darling

direwolf20 8mo ago
Hentai has different legal status to realistic pictures of real people
nemomarx 8mo ago
I think there's a difference between "user uploaded material isn't properly moderated" and "the sites own chatbot generates porn on request based on images of women who didn't agree to it", no?
- nailer 8mo ago
  But it doesn’t. Group has always had Aggressive filters on sexual content just like every other generative AI tool. People who have found exploits, just like other generative AI tool.
- tick_tock_tick 8mo ago
  Not really?
techblueberry 8mo ago
Did you report it or just let it continue doing harm?
fumar 8mo ago
Define leftist for back in the twitter days? I used twitter early in release. Don’t recall it being a faction specific platform.
- reverius42 8mo ago
  I think they're using it in the American sense, which means "anywhere in the political spectrum of the leftmost 60% of the population".

mhh__ 8mo ago

[flagged]

isodev 8mo ago

Good and honestly it’s high time. There used to be a time when we could give corps the benefit of the doubt but that time is clearly over. Beyond the CSAM, X is a cesspool of misinformation and generally the worst examples of humanity.

mekdoonggi 8mo ago
I don't know how we even allowed these companies to not be responsible for everything on their platform. The entirety of the social media platform is based on the idea that the company isn't responsible for what the users post, which is just wrong. If you own a magazine, you should be held responsible for everything published. You shouldn't be allowed to profit from publishing anything, then hide behind "the users did it, not us". And in this case, Elon should be held responsible for every single image of CSAM published on X. Same with Zuck. Same with Truth Social, whatever you want.

miki123211 8mo ago

This vindicates the pro-AI censorship crowd I guess. It definitely makes it clear what is expected of AI companies. Your users aren't responsible for what they use your model for, you are, so you'd better make sure your model can't ever be used for anything nefarious. If you can't do that without keeping the model closed and verifying everyone's identities... well, that's good for your profits I guess.

culi 8mo ago
It's not really different from how we treat any other platform that can host CSAM. I guess the main difference is that it's being "made" instead of simply "distributed" here
- toxik 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - blipvert 8mo ago
    Pro-tip: if you are actively assisting someone in doing illegal things then you are an accomplice.
  - krig 8mo ago
    Those images are generated from a training set, and it is already well known and reported that those training sets contain _real_ CSAM, real violence, real abuse. That "generated" face of a child is based on real images of real children.
    - pavlov 8mo ago
      Indeed, a Stanford study from a few years back showed that the image data sets used by essentially everybody contain CSAM. Everybody else has teams building guardrails to mitigate this fundamental existential horror of these models. Musk fired all the safety people and decided to go all in on “adult” content.

utopiah 8mo ago

To people claiming a physical raid is pointless from the point of gathering data : - you are thinking about a company doing good things the right way. You are thinking about a company abiding by the law, storing data on its own server, having good practices, etc. The moment a company starts to do dubious stuff then good practices start to go out the window. People write email with cryptic analogies, people start deleting emails, ... then as the circumvention become more numerous and complex, there needs to still be a trail in order to remain understandable. That trail will be in written form somehow and that must be hidden. It might be paper, it might be shadow IT but the point is that if you are not just forgetting to keep track of coffee pods at the social corner, you will leave traces. So yes, raids do make sense BECAUSE it's about recurring complex activities that are just too hard to keep in the mind of one single individual over long periods of time.

tick_tock_tick 8mo ago
No need to be coy the raid exists because it's a way to punish the company without proving anything. They have zero intention of getting even the slightest bit of valuable data related to Grok from this.
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  What's your evidence?
- fyredge 8mo ago
  Unlike the current American administration who condones raids on homes without warrants and justifies violence with lies, this France raid follows something called rule of law. So no, don't be coy and pretend that all governments are like American institutions.
  - Levitz 8mo ago
    >Unlike the current American administration who condones raids on homes without warrants and justifies violence with lies, this France raid follows something called rule of law. Iffy on that front, actually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel_Durov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...

touwer 8mo ago

[flagged]

Animats 8mo ago

One of the charges is "fraudulent data extraction by an organised group." That's going to affect the entire social media industry if applied broadly.

muyuu 8mo ago
Frankly it sounds to me like a "show me the man and I'll show you the crime" kind of operation. France and the UK, and judging by yesterday's speech by the PM of Spain maybe the whole EU might be looking to do what China and Russia did earlier on and start cracking down on foreign social media by making it impossible to operate without total alignment with their vision and not just their (new) rules. Together with a push for local alternatives, that currently don't seem to be there, it may spell the end for a big chunk of the Global social network landscape. I still believe that the EU and aligned countries would rather have America to agree to much tighter speech controls, digital ID, ToS-based speech codes as apparently US Democrats partly or totally agree to. But if they have workable alternatives they will deal with them from a different position.
- Palmik 8mo ago
  > EU might be looking to do what China and Russia did earlier on and start cracking down on foreign social media For some reason you forgot to mention "Like the US did with TikTok".
  - muyuu 8mo ago
    that was decades later, but yea I don't think for a second that was justifiable - not even considering that China had completely closed shop for America decades earlier and this was a 1-way openness relationship for a long time; they could have sold this as a reciprocity issue but they didn't esp. when America already controls the main outlets through Android Play Store and Apple Store, and yep, they have proven to control them not just happen to host them as a country arguably America did have valid security concerns with Huawei though, but if those are the rules then you cannot complain later on
  - junto 8mo ago

mnewme 8mo ago

Good one. No platform ever should allow CSAM content. And the fact that they didn’t even care and haven’t want to spend money for implementing guardrails or moderation is deeply concerning. This has imho nothing to do with model censorship, but everything with allowing that kind of content on a platform

exodust 8mo ago
[flagged]
- cess11 8mo ago
  [flagged]
- myrmidon 8mo ago
  There are multiple valid reasons to fight realistic computer-generated CSAM content. Uncontrolled profileration of AI-CSAM makes detection of "genuine" data much harder, prosecution of perpetrators more difficult and specifically in many of the grok cases it harms young victims that were used as templates for the material. Content is unacceptable if its proliferation causes sufficient harm, and this is arguably the case here.
  - Eisenstein 8mo ago
    > Uncontrolled profileration of AI-CSAM makes detection of "genuine" data much harder I don't follow. If the prosecutor can't find evidence of a crime and a person is not charged, that is considered harmful? As such the 5th amendment would fall under the same category and so would encryption. Making law enforcement have to work harder to find evidence of a crime cannot be criminalized unless you can come up with a reason why the actions themselves deserve to be criminalized. > specifically in many of the grok cases it harms young victims that were used as templates for the material. What is the criteria for this? If something is suitably transformed such that the original model for it is not discernable or identifiable, how can it harm them? Do not take these as an argument against the idea you are arguing for, but as rebuttals against arguments that are not convincing, or if they were, would be terrible if applied generally.

exodust 8mo ago

[flagged]

joe_mamba 8mo ago
[flagged]
- ilogik 8mo ago
  The UK is also opening investigations into the Esptein stuff. https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/starmers-government-aids-police-probe-into-mandelsons-epstein-leaks-2026-02-03/ https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/starmers-government-aids-po... Unlike the US administration which seems to be fine with what epstein and X are doing
  - joe_mamba 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - SiempreViernes 8mo ago
      What's this comment about? Do you think no other CSAM distribution should be investigated until the stuff in Epstein files is sorted?
    - owebmaster 8mo ago
      [flagged]
  - GordonS 8mo ago
    Except Starmer is making sure that the "investigation" is hobbled - anything seemed important to "national security" will be excluded! The UK's "investigation" is a farce.
- amelius 8mo ago
  I think the reasoning is that the AI contributes to more epsteins. In some way.

csmpltn 8mo ago

[flagged]

mortarion 8mo ago
Maybe you should look up child pornography laws in Europe. In Sweden, the mere act of scrolling by an image depicting (real or not) a child in a sexual position, and having it stored in the browser cache, is a crime with up to 2 years of prison time.
- csmpltn 8mo ago
  How does that negate my initial comment?

ljsprague 8mo ago

[flagged]

tene80i 8mo ago
I'm sure it's comforting to believe that people you disagree with do so for silly reasons, but many people will support this just because we like the rule of law.

dominicrose 8mo ago

A Russian in a French prison says my country isn't free. Well, let that message spread to other criminals. You're not welcome in France.

blitzar 8mo ago

[flagged]

tokai 8mo ago

Good old HN. Users losing their collective minds over rule of law and CSAM being bad.

y-curious 8mo ago
Found the guy who supports digital ID and involuntary phone database scanning
- tokai 8mo ago
  Found the cheese pizza enjoyer.
  - ddtaylor 8mo ago
    HN is capable of a better discussion without personal attacks.
- ddtaylor 8mo ago
  HN is capable of a better discussion without personal attacks.
code_for_monkey 8mo ago
extremely cursed userbase sometimes
hearsathought 8mo ago
> CSAM being bad. Agreed. It's why it's difficult to support France who has sheltered Roman Polanski for decades. It's strange how people like you only think it's bad when it suits your political agenda.

krautburglar 8mo ago

Raid all of them. Raid Google. Raid Facebook. Raid Apple. Raid Microsoft. Big tech has gotten away with everything from fraud[0] to murder[1] for decades. Black outfits. Rappel lines. Automatics. Touch that server Prakesh, and you won't live to touch another. [0] https://nypost.com/2025/12/15/business/facebook-most-cited-in-online-complaints-for-hosting-scam-ads-that-cost-users-billions-watchdog/ https://nypost.com/2025/12/15/business/facebook-most-cited-i... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suchir_Balaji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suchir_Balaji

patrick451 8mo ago

Until the EU gets their act together on free speech, it's high time the united states hits them with aggressive economic sanctions.

poseva 8mo ago
Is this sarcasm ? because sounds like sarcasm. If Grok generating naked images of children is your ideea of free speech no wonder nobody takes a stand against Trump and Co., you somehow managed turn your common sense to dust...
causalscience 8mo ago
[dead]
hearsathought 8mo ago
Europe/EU should have whatever free speech they want. But we should annex all european controlled territory in the western hemisphere. The amount of territory that european empires still control in this hemisphere is alarming and frankly embarrassing. From greenland to "french" guyana to the falklands, it should all be seized.
coffeebeqn 8mo ago
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/freedom-of-expression-index?globe=1&globeRotation=43.98%2C12.71&globeZoom=2.5 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/freedom-of-expression-ind...
drawfloat 8mo ago
Settings aside this is about CSAM, the US is the only one of the two to shut down a foreign social network because it dislikes what was said on it. The US doesn't get to play that card anymore.

voidUpdate 8mo ago

> "the only country in the world that is criminally persecuting all social networks that give people some degree of freedom" Sounds like he's never been to Russia. Which is weird, given that he's Russian

arielcostas 8mo ago
Yeah, and in his mind the only social networks that exist are Telegram and Twitter. Mastodon doesn't exist, bluesky doesn't either, rr any of Meta's products (including Threads, direct competitor to Twitter with seemingly more bots and propaganda)
fer 8mo ago
Yeah, as someone who's been to Russia pre-war, and has worked and befriended Russians, the beam in the eye is quite strong in many. It's striking because the social contract there is basically that you're left alone as long as you don't become a thorn of the power, social network-mediated or not, and I'm not even talking about Putin and his entourage, but local administration in a remote village too. Zvyagintsev portrays it royally in Leviathan, as it's been portrayed by Dostoyevsky and Tosltoy before. My most recent case: I went on holiday to a resort in Turkey, numerous Russians, families, retired, etc. I don't pass as a Russian-speaker (but I understand quite well) and once they hear me talking other unrelated language they naturally start to speak more freely in front of me (i.e. more liberal use of swearing, and even slurs if no other Russians are around). While sunbathing, or at the restaurant, or the pool, they were talking about daily, mundane things, same in the restaurant, etc. But when floating in pairs 20-30m from the shore? Politics.

code_for_monkey 8mo ago

lord some of the people on this site need their hard drives searched.

buellerbueller 8mo ago
[flagged]
- goodolddays9090 8mo ago
  [dead]
- code_for_monkey 8mo ago
  its this elon cult, its "anything he does has to be defended" so you end up contorting yourself into defending actual csam!
- krjgmsmsn 8mo ago
  It might be related to that the bitcoin metadata contains csam, I.e. if you have a full ledger stored you’re technically a criminal.
ddtaylor 8mo ago
I was once closer to s free speech absolutist, but this has always been where that discussion leads. The lines were clearer decades ago because someone who interacted with CSAM was closely involved and their harm was easier to see in totality. Over time the gap between people who caused that harm and those that think they are not hurting anyone has widened. With AI it caused many of those that thought it was acceptable to consume illegal content to put another layer between their victims and offload the moral baggage.
throwaway290 8mo ago
To me it became clear when people here rejected any compromises on privacy and anonymous on device scanning of messages/data. Not because they rejected it but how they rejected it. People here didn't say "yeah it's a real evil problem and e2e tech that we build makes it almost impossible to catch and helps it scale, so let's find the right tradeoff that minimizes privacy invasion". No. People here just mocked "think of the children" and said something along the lines of no amount of suffering can make any restriction to privacy be acceptable. The fact that 99% of our life is literally compromising our freedom for others they don't care. To buellerbueller's killed comment, I totally feel it. it was a shocker when it turned out many of my fellow Russians got no problem with Putin's war and I bet that's what half of USA feels.

wnevets 8mo ago

The man that is friends with a bunch of pedophiles owns a website that is becoming known for generating CSAM? What are the chances?

devwastaken 8mo ago

E.U is replacing their citizens with unvetted violent criminals. They have to vote for whoever gives them free stuff. The powers doing this are upset a company in the U.S allows their citizens to protest it.

mekdoonggi 8mo ago
Read that on X?
- Pedro_Ribeiro 8mo ago
  Do you honestly not believe it is likely that EU is importing votes? Also, haven't you seen the general push towards censorship, attempts to ban VPNs, and all the other shenanigans happening in the EU? Do you believe this is disconnected from the legal attempts on Twitter and Telegram? Is it really a conspiracy theory at this point? Politicians do all kinds of evil shit, but these playbook tactics are where you draw the line? I'm European and live here, before you say I'm getting these takes on X.
  - enether 8mo ago
    +1 from an European, it's beyond obvious and I don't understand why people are letting {politics, mainstream media painting of X} shape their belief on these extremely pressing and important issues.

Havoc 8mo ago

The lack of legal/regulatory reaction US side on CSAM is pretty bewildering. And ominously mirrors the Epstein saga - other countries seem to be moving fast while US seems to be trying very hard to not move at all