Several leading French newspapers have said they are suing the social media platform X, accusing it of running their content without payment.
The joint action against the company run by the US billionaire Elon Musk is being led by several daily newspapers – Le Figaro, Les Echos, Le Parisien and Le Monde – and includes other titles such as the culture magazine Telerama, Courrier International, HuffPost, Malesherbes Publications and the Nouvel Obs news weekly.
They accuse the site, formerly known as Twitter, of violating “neighbouring rights”, which, under a European directive adopted into French law, are due when social media platforms republish news content.
The newspapers, as well as the French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP), had already asked for an emergency injunction against X, which they accuse of not negotiating.
On 24 May, a Paris tribunal agreed with the media companies, and gave X two months to provide commercial data that would allow the outlets to assess the income the platform earns from their content.
X “has not yet complied” with this decision, “demonstrating its continued intent to avoid its legal obligations”, the newspapers said in a statement, justifying their latest suit.
France has been fighting for years to protect the publishing rights and revenue of its press and news agencies against what it terms the domination of powerful tech companies that share news content or show news stories in web searches.
To tackle this, the EU has created a form of copyright, called neighbouring rights, that allows news media to demand compensation for the use of their content.
France has been a test case for the EU rules. In 2019, it was the first EU country to enact the directive on the publishing rights of media companies and news agencies, which required large tech platforms to open talks with publishers seeking remuneration for use of news content. After initial resistance, Google and Facebook both agreed to pay some French media for articles shown in web searches.
In March, a French lawyer for X said the social network was not subject to the neighbouring rights directive because, unlike Google or Facebook, X rests on “what users post” and not on what it publishes itself, the public broadcaster France TV reported.
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Last year, Musk posted on X about the AFP case, writing: “This is bizarre. They want us to pay *them* for traffic to their site where they make advertising revenue and we don’t?!”
An X official said the company does not comment on open legal proceedings.