French authorities investigate alleged Holocaust denial posts on Elon Musk’s Grok AI
French public prosecutors are investigating allegations by government ministers and human rights groups that Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, made statements denying the Holocaust.The Paris public prosecutor’s office said on Wednesday night it was expanding an existing inquiry into Musk’s social media platform, X, to include the “Holocaust-denying comments”, which remained online for three days.Beneath a now-deleted post by a convicted French Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi militant, Grok on Monday advanced several false claims commonly made by people who deny Nazi Germany murdered 6 million Jews during the second world war.The chatbot said in French that the gas chambers at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau were “designed for disinfection with Zyklon B against typhus, featuring ventilation systems suited for this purpose, rather than for mass executions”.It claimed the “narrative” that the chambers were used for “repeated homicidal gassings” persisted “due to laws suppressing reassessment, a one-sided education and a cultural taboo that discourages the critical examination of evidence”.
The post was ultimately deleted but was still online, with more than 1m views at 6pm on Wednesday, French media reported,More than 1 million people died at Auschwitz-Birkenau, most of them Jews,Zyklon B was the poison gas used to kill inmates in gas chambers,In further comments, Grok referred to “lobbies” wielding “disproportionate influence through control of the media, political funding and dominant cultural narratives” to “impose taboos”, apparently echoing a well-known antisemitic trope,Challenged by the Auschwitz Museum, the AI eventually back-pedalled, saying the reality of the Holocaust was “indisputable” and it “rejected denialism outright”.
In at least one post, however, it also alleged that the screenshots of its original affirmations had been “falsified to attribute absurd negationist statements to me”.Holocaust denial – the claim that the Nazi genocide was fabricated or has been exaggerated – is a criminal offence in 14 EU countries including France and Germany, while many others have laws criminalising genocide denial including the Holocaust.Three French government ministers, Roland Lescure, Anne Le Hénanff and Aurore Bergé, said late on Wednesday they had reported “manifestly illegal content published by Grok on X” to the prosecutor under article 40 of France’s criminal code.The French Human Rights League (LDH) and the anti-discrimination group SOS Racisme confirmed on Thursday that they had also filed complaints against the first Grok post for “disputing crimes against humanity”.Nathalie Tehio, the LDH’s president, said the complaint was “unusual” because it concerned statements made by an artificial intelligence chatbot, thus raising the question of “what [material] this AI is being trained on”.
Tehio said Musk’s responsibility as X’s owner was key since the platform was not moderating even “obviously illegal content”.SOS Racisme said X had “again shown its inability or refusal to prevent the dissemination of Holocaust denial content”.Sign up to Headlines EuropeA digest of the morning's main headlines from the Europe edition emailed direct to you every week dayafter newsletter promotionThe Paris public prosecutor’s office said: “Holocaust-denying comments shared by the artificial intelligence Grok, on X, have been included in the ongoing investigation being conducted by [this office’s] cybercrime division.”French authorities launched an investigation last July into claims that X, formerly known as Twitter, had skewed its algorithm to allow “foreign interference”, with the inquiry examining the actions of the company and its senior managers.Grok last week spread far-right conspiracies about the 2015 Paris attacks, falsely claiming victims of the Islamist terrorist attack on the Bataclan concert hall had been castrated and eviscerated, and fabricating “testimony” from invented “witnesses”.
The AI chatbot has previously generated false claims that Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election, made unrelated references to “white genocide” and spewed antisemitic content and referred to itself as “MechaHitler”.Earlier this year the company said it was “actively working to remove the inappropriate posts” and taking steps “to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X”, in a post on X.X has not so far responded to requests for comment.
Facebook and Instagram to start kicking Australian teenagers off platforms as social media ban looms
Australian Facebook and Instagram users under 16 will be notified starting Thursday that their accounts will be deactivated by 10 December, as Meta begins to comply with the Albanese government’s social media ban.Users affected by the ban will receive 14 days’ notice of their pending account deactivation through a combination of in-app messages, email and SMS before their access is cut off.The ban will affect users on Facebook and Instagram, as well as Threads, as an Instagram account is required to use that platform. Messenger is excluded from the ban – but Meta has had to develop a way for users to keep access to Messenger without a Facebook account as a result of the ban.Meta will begin stopping access to existing accounts and blocking under-16s from registering new accounts from 4 December, with access removed for all affected accounts by 10 December, the company said
TikTok to give users power to reduce amount of AI content on their feeds
TikTok is giving users the power to reduce the amount of artificial intelligence-made content on their feeds, as it revealed the platform hosts more than 1bn AI videos.The change, which is being tested over the next few weeks before a global rollout, comes as new video-generating tools such as OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo 3 have spurred a surge in AI content online.The Guardian revealed in August that nearly one in 10 of the fastest-growing YouTube channels globally only show AI-generated videos. Many qualify as “AI slop”, the term for low-quality, mass-produced content that is often nonsensical or surreal.Jade Nester, TikTok’s European director of public policy for safety and privacy, said: “We know from our community that many people enjoy content made with AI tools, from digital art to science explainers, and we want to give people the power to see more or less of that, based on their own preferences
Meta wins major US antitrust case and won’t have to break off WhatsApp or Instagram
Meta defeated a major challenge to its business on Tuesday when a US judge ruled that the company does not hold a monopoly in social networking.The case, brought by the US Federal Trade Commission, could have forced the tech giant to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp, with the former FTC chair accusing the company of operating a “buy or bury” scheme against nascent competitors. The tech giant bought WhatsApp for $19bn in 2014. Losing either the image-based social network, which generates an estimated half of Meta’s revenue, or the world’s most popular messaging app could have done existential damage to Meta’s empire.The US district judge James Boasberg issued his ruling on Tuesday after the historic antitrust trial wrapped up in late May
What is Cloudflare – and why did its outage take down so many websites?
The internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare suffered an outage on Tuesday, making many websites inaccessible for about three hours.Cloudflare is a global cloud services and cybersecurity firm. It provides datacentres, website and email security, protection from data loss and defences against cyber threats, among other things. It describes itself as providing an “immune system for the internet”, with technology that sits between its clients and the wider world that blocks billions of cyber threats daily. It also uses its global infrastructure to speed up internet traffic
Cloudflare says ‘incident now resolved’ after outage causes error messages across the internet – as it happened
The firm has just issued an update saying it believes the incident over.A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.I’ve just quickly tested several key sites which are loading again.Key sites around the world went down, some for a few hours, after a widely relied-upon Internet infrastructure company suffered an unknown issueThe outages took place in the early hours of US morning and during UK business hoursIt affected users of everything from Spotify, ChatGPT, X, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Canva to retail websites of Visa, Vodafone and Vinted and UK grocery chains Asda and M&S
Cloudflare outage causes error messages across the internet
A key piece of the internet’s usually hidden infrastructure suffered a global outage on Tuesday, causing error messages to flash up across websites.Cloudflare, a US company whose services include defending millions of websites against malicious attacks, experienced an unidentified problem that meant internet users could not access some of its customers’ websites.Some site owners could not access their performance dashboards. Sites including X and OpenAI suffered increased outages at the same time as Cloudflare’s problems, according to Downdetector.The outage was reported at 11
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