The US Justice Department has refused to help French prosecutors investigating X, sending Paris a two-page letter that amounts to a direct shot across the bow at European speech regulation.
American authorities will not serve summonses, will not facilitate interviews, and will not lend their cooperation to what they describe as a foreign effort to prosecute a US company for editorial decisions protected at home.
The letter, dated Friday and reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, came from the Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs. It rejected three separate French requests this year, and its language was unusually blunt.
“This investigation seeks to use the criminal legal system in France to regulate a public square for the free expression of ideas and opinions in a manner contrary to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution,” the letter said.
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It went on to call the French requests “an effort to entangle the United States in a politically charged criminal proceeding aimed at wrongfully regulating through prosecution the business activities of a social media platform.”
That is the Justice Department telling a European ally its prosecution is a speech case dressed up as a criminal case, and that the United States will not help build it.
The Justice Department and French authorities did not respond to requests for comment.
The French investigation began in January 2025, after a lawmaker and another official filed complaints arguing that X’s content-selection algorithm tilted toward Elon Musk’s views, and that the tilt amounted to foreign interference in France.
The theory converts an editorial choice, which is what an algorithm is, into a potential crime.
By July, prosecutors wanted access to the algorithm itself to examine it for bias.
In November, the scope widened after reports of allegedly antisemitic posts, including Holocaust denial, which is illegal in France. In January of this year, prosecutors added the creation and distribution of child sexual abuse material and nonconsensual deepfakes to the list of potential charges, which was misleading at best.
Investigators raided X’s Paris office in February. X called the search “an abusive act of law enforcement theater.” The platform is part of Musk’s artificial-intelligence firm xAI, which has now been purchased by his rocket company SpaceX.
French officials then summoned Musk, former X chief executive Linda Yaccarino, and other employees for what they described as voluntary interviews. Musk’s summons was set for Monday. French prosecutors can issue arrest warrants for suspects who skip interviews, which makes the word “voluntary” do less work than it appears to.
An xAI official welcomed the Justice Department’s intervention. “We are grateful to the Justice Department for rejecting this effort by a prosecutor in Paris to compel our CEO and several employees to sit for interviews,” the official said. “We hope the Parisian authorities will now come to their senses, recognize that there is no wrongdoing here, and terminate their baseless investigation.”
The American pushback is important because the investigation is the sharp edge of a larger European project. Regulators across the continent are rolling out content-moderation rules with real teeth, and the Trump administration and other US officials have accused Europeans of trying to silence dissent not only on their continent but globally.
Vice President JD Vance spent much of the year criticizing European speech restrictions in public speeches. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has flagged foreign prosecutions of Americans for online speech as a diplomatic concern. The letter from the Office of International Affairs turns that rhetoric into policy.
What makes the French case useful to American officials is how exposed the speech-policing logic is.
The investigation started with a politician unhappy about algorithmic favoritism.
The serious charges, child sexual abuse material and deepfakes, were added later, on top of the original complaint. Tacking grave offenses onto a case that began as a complaint about algorithmic politics gives the prosecution cover and makes it harder to say out loud what the inquiry is actually about. The Justice Department said it anyway.
The refusal also draws a line for other European governments watching. A prosecutor who wants to inspect a US platform’s recommendation algorithm for political bias, with criminal penalties attached, now knows the American government will not help deliver the paperwork.
Every platform makes choices about what to amplify and what to bury. Those choices are speech. A legal theory that criminalizes the wrong choices turns algorithmic design into something prosecutors can punish after the fact, and the United States has just declined to assist in that project.
The chilling effect is the reason any of this matters beyond X. A social media company that knows its algorithm can be subpoenaed, its executives summoned, and its Paris office raided will make different decisions about what to recommend and what to permit. The threat is enough. Actual convictions are not required for the behavior to change, which is why American authorities appear to have decided that refusing cooperation, publicly and in writing, is worth the diplomatic friction.
The Justice Department’s refusal is narrow in a technical sense. It does not stop the French investigation. It does not prevent an arrest warrant if Musk declines to appear on Monday. What it does is put the United States on record as treating the prosecution as a speech case, refusing to let American mutual-assistance treaties be used to deliver Europeans the tools to punish American editorial decisions. For the transatlantic fight over who gets to set the rules of online speech, that is new territory.
