Elon Musk’s Grokipedia cites neo-Nazi website 42 times: study

Elon Musk’s online encyclopedia, Grokipedia, cites the neo-Nazi website Stormfront as a source 42 times and relies on other websites that experts have shunned.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s online encyclopedia, Grokipedia, cites the neo-Nazi website Stormfront as a source 42 times and relies on other websites that experts have shunned as unreliable or hate-filled, according to an analysis by two researchers at Cornell University.

Grokipedia, which Musk launched last month as a competitor to what he called the “woke” Wikipedia, also cites the conspiracy theory website Infowars as a source 34 times and the white nationalist website VDare 107 times, the researchers found.

Those citations make up a small percentage of Grokipedia’s overall sourcing, but they are notable because Wikipedia, by contrast, does not treat those sources as credible. Wikipedia generally does not allow contributors to use them as references, even as primary sources of information about racist ideas or conspiracy theories, according to the Cornell analysis and Wikipedia’s public list of English-language sources.

“The guardrails are off,” Harold Triedman, one of the paper’s co-authors and a computer science graduate student at Cornell, said in a phone interview Wednesday.

“The publicly determined, community-oriented rules that try to maintain Wikipedia as a comprehensive, reliable, human-generated source are not in application on Grokipedia,” he said.