If for Wikipedia Francisco Franco was “a Spanish soldier and dictator” who was part of “the military leadership that carried out the 1936 coup d’état against the democratic government of the Second Republic”, for Grokipedia he was “a Spanish general and head of state who commanded the nationalist forces until victory in the Spanish Civil War” and “put an end to the political instability and revolutionary violence of the Second Spanish Republic, which had witnessed widespread strikes, burning of churches and murders by militias of left.” And what is Grokipedia? Well, Wikipedia, one more tool with which to pervert reality.
Like an angry child when told he has done something wrong, The richest man in the world was very upset that Wikipedia highlighted the Nazi symbolism of the salute he gave during the ceremony celebrating Donald Trump’s inauguration.. He had already criticized the cooperative encyclopedia before, but from that moment on it became another of his very personal crusades. “Stop funding Wikipedia!” he bellowed on his own social network, In short, its true, because The tycoon’s Grokipedia is a mixed bag of common falsehoods in the extremist and denialist environment.
Although a large part of the more than 800,000 articles that Grokipedia currently contains are almost carbon copies of the texts that Wikipedia contains, the same does not happen with the topics that it considers controversial. “Here – – Grokipedia veers sharply into right-wing arguments, inaccuracies, criticism of traditional media and other baseless conspiracy theories“. It happens with Franco, but also with many other issues.
What does Grokipedia, for example, think of the assault on the Capitol by Donald Trump’s followers? On Wikipedia they define it as “an attempted self-coup d’état.” In Musk’s encyclopedia, however, the assault was just “a disturbance” that “temporarily interrupted deliberations” and caused “the evacuation of legislators.” Grokipedia also states that “the incident” involved, among other things, a “legitimate expression of complaints against alleged electoral irregularities” and criticizes “the left-wing media” for “emphasizing Trump’s rhetorical role in inciting the crowd, presenting his January 6 speech as a direct causal trigger for the assault.” The truth and nothing but the truth.
Another thing that bothers Musk’s lexicon is the scientific consensus. For example, with climate change. According to Grokipedia, the media, which are attacked in countless entries, generate “public alarm” and “moral panic” and favor “the imposition of consensus.” What a thing, to impose what science says. In this attack on scientific intelligence, Grokipedia also uses racism. As Will Stancil has highlighted in Bluesky, “the entry on ‘race and intelligence’ states that the IQ of sub-Saharan Africans is around 70 and that their origin is mainly genetic. It also cites Mankind Quarterly, a pseudoscientific journal of white nationalist ideology.” The page on apartheid, a system from which the Musk family benefited, deserves a separate chapter. If you read it and believe it, you will think that the conditions of black South African people improved thanks to segregation.
Musk and Grokipedia also do not miss the opportunity to attack trans peoplesomething that the tycoon usually does whenever he can. According to the encyclopedia of truth from the richest man in the world, if there are more trans people it is because of “greater access to social networks.” Grokipedia assures that there is “a social contagion.” It also relates trans people to sick people. In the ‘Gender’ entry, this is defined as the “binary classification of human beings as male or female based on their biological sex.” The truth about Musk and Trump.
In the end, Musk’s path with Grokipedia is the same one he developed with the acquisition of Twitter and turning it into X or the one Donald Trump did with Truth Social or Chris Pavlovski with Rumble, all of them. children of Trumpist ideologue Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News. Spaces where far-right ideas and propaganda are promulgated with the excuse of a cultural war against what they derogatorily call woke. But, ultimately, and, “To lean towards Grokipedia is to abandon the world of evidence for that of belief”.
The most curious thing is that if Grokipedia was born in part because of Musk’s annoyance with the Nazi salute, its own encyclopedia tries to explain and justify the event. “Elon Musk’s gesture sparked a transatlantic debate,” he says. “European critics, including German officials, condemned it as a banned Nazi salute based solely on form, while American defenders emphasized the context, intent and Musk’s lack of support for Nazism, interpreting it as an enthusiastic salute or a supposed Roman expression. […] The rapid labeling of Nazism by the mainstream media, despite Musk’s pro-Israel stances and criticism of the AfD [sic]reflects interpretive biases that favor historical association over situational evidence.” It’s “the truth” from Elon Musk.
