\n<\/p>\n
What does Elon Musk want the world to know about \u201cwhite genocide theory\u201d? Because he\u2019s been vocal about the issue in the past\u2014advancing the idea, for example, that Jews are pushing \u201chatred against whites\u201d\u2014I decided to search for the term on Grokipedia, the competitor to Wikipedia that Musk launched yesterday.<\/p>\n
First, the site uses just that term, theory<\/em>, rather than conspiracy theory<\/em>, as you would see on Wikipedia and elsewhere. Just a few sentences in, Grokipedia provides the \u201cempirical underpinnings\u201d of this supposed campaign to eliminate white people of European descent around the world. And the site argues that conversation about this purported genocide is systematically suppressed by the media and academia, which are \u201cprone to ideological biases favoring multiculturalism\u201d and \u201crelegate the theory to fringe conspiracy status despite the observable data on population trajectories.\u201d<\/p>\n Other entries on Grokipedia contain a similar slant. On the entry for Adolf Hitler, the f\u00fchrer\u2019s leadership and \u201crapid economic\u201d achievements are noted before the Holocaust; the \u201cIslam\u201d page questions the religion\u2019s \u201cinherent compatibility with liberal democracy.\u201d The Grokipedia entry for Musk himself notes a \u201creported 20-pound weight loss\u201d and propensity for \u201cweightlifting and strength training,\u201d while omitting any direct reference to Musk\u2019s maternal grandfather\u2014a man who thoroughly documented his own vociferous racism and antidemocratic beliefs and supported South Africa\u2019s apartheid regime. Grokipedia was created by Musk\u2019s company xAI, and all of its entries were written by Musk\u2019s generative-AI model, Grok. When I asked the company about the site, an anonymous spokesperson responded only with the message \u201cLegacy Media Lies.\u201d<\/p>\n Grokipedia is the latest step in Musk\u2019s obsession with the mainstream media and institutions he believes have poisoned the world and the web. In 2022, soon after Musk purchased Twitter, he reinstated banned extremist accounts and appeared to tweak the platform\u2019s recommendation algorithm, leading to what independent researchers called \u201cunprecedented\u201d rises in hate speech. Musk effectively turned Twitter, which he renamed X, into a bastion of white supremacy. A year later, Musk\u2019s company xAI launched the chatbot Grok as an antidote to the left-wing biases he perceived in other top AI products; Grok has since obsessed over a conspiracy theory about \u201cwhite genocide\u201d particularly in South Africa, praised Hitler, told me what the \u201cgood races\u201d are, and explicitly repeated Musk\u2019s personal views in response to queries about controversial topics.<\/p>\n More recently, Musk has criticized Wikipedia as \u201can extension of legacy media propaganda\u201d and called for the site to be defunded. Wikipedia has many well-documented issues with accuracy, racism, and bias, but they are not limited to any one worldview. By creating his own version of Wikipedia, Musk did not seem motivated to address those issues but rather gave himself the power to root out anything he deemed \u201cwoke\u201d or leftist; last week, he delayed the launch of Grokipedia because, in Musk\u2019s own words, \u201cwe need to do more work to purge out the propaganda.\u201d<\/p>\n Here\u2019s how this likely worked in practice: First, Musk turned X into a center of gravity for his own far-right views, and appeared to amplify those who share them. Then he fed this repository of conspiracy theories, vitriol, and memes into an AI model already designed not to shy away from controversial or even hateful views. Finally, Musk used that AI model to write an anti-woke encyclopedia. Now Grokipedia recasts its creator\u2019s opinions as a fountain of objective truth\u2014providing a \u201ccomprehensive collection of all knowledge,\u201d as Musk wrote on X. Grok, it should be noted, likely trained on Wikipedia articles, and several Grokipedia entries explicitly note that \u201cthe content is adapted from Wikipedia.\u201d Having cannibalized what\u2019s there, Musk wants to use his chatbot to remake the media, internet, and universe of knowledge to his liking.<\/p>\n Musk\u2019s worldview is all over Grokipedia. The Grokipedia entry on Alternative for Germany, or AfD\u2014a far-right populist party that Musk has lauded\u2014states that the party calls for \u201crepatriation of non-integrated migrants and criminal offenders\u201d (which other sources might call mass deportation); \u201cdefends traditional family structures against state promotion of gender ideology\u201d; and \u201crejects multiculturalism in favor of preserving German cultural and linguistic predominance.\u201d The first paragraph of the Grokipedia entry for Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine repeatedly cites the Kremlin\u2019s official website, using a speech from Vladimir Putin to describe the invasion\u2019s purpose as \u201cdemilitarizing and denazifying Ukraine, protecting ethnic Russians and Russian speakers from alleged persecution in Donbas, and preventing Ukraine\u2019s integration into NATO to neutralize threats to Russian security.\u201d The page on \u201cApartheid\u201d devotes many paragraphs to \u201cdebunking prevailing narratives\u201d that depict \u201cApartheid as a system of unremitting total oppression for black South Africans.\u201d The page for \u201cTransgender\u201d uses the term \u201ctransgenderism,\u201d a term that GLAAD opposes because it is used to \u201cinaccurately and harmfully imply that being trans is a political ideology, rather than an authentic aspect of one\u2019s personhood.\u201d And so on. (Musk did not respond to a request for comment.)<\/p>\n As easy as it would be to understand X, Grok, and Grokipedia as a Musk cinematic universe, the truth is that this site is part of a much larger epistemic transformation. People are seeking information not just as a way of acquiring knowledge, but to reify their political beliefs; if you don\u2019t like the purported libs of Wikipedia, turn instead to the right-wing Grokipedia. Even before Musk started attacking Wikipedia, the site had become a punching bag for the tech right. The White House crypto and AI czar, David Sacks, who is also an influential investor, suggested the idea and name for Grokipedia on an episode of his podcast last month, and Musk ran with it. In some sense, he is merely adding to the parallel internet that already exists in the form of social media such as Rumble and Truth Social; podcasts from Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens; and media outlets including Breitbart<\/em> and Right Side Broadcasting Network.<\/p>\n To relabel, redefine, and repackage some of the most controversial, vile, and flat-out wrong ideas as a step toward \u201cunderstanding the Universe,\u201d as Musk has described the goal of xAI, is to reshape that universe itself. The differences between any given Grokipedia and Wikipedia entry are in some sense hard to debate because there is no shared ground upon which to have a reasoned disagreement; to gravitate toward Grokipedia is to leave the world of evidence for that of belief. And Musk, with his empire of tech companies and unprecedented wealth, has a singular power to proselytize.<\/p>\n The Grokipedia project is only getting started, and once it is completed, Musk said he wants to send copies of Grokipedia to \u201cthe Moon and Mars to preserve it for the future.\u201d He was invoking one of his favorite science-fiction novels, Isaac Asimov\u2019s Foundation<\/em>, in which humans want to create an intergalactic \u201cFoundation\u201d of knowledge to survive civilization\u2019s impending collapse. Here, perhaps, is Musk\u2019s task: to abandon one civilization as he erects a new one in his image.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What does Elon Musk want the world to know about \u201cwhite genocide theory\u201d? Because he\u2019s been vocal about the issue in the past\u2014advancing the idea, for example, that Jews are pushing \u201chatred against whites\u201d\u2014I decided to search for the term on Grokipedia, the competitor to Wikipedia that Musk launched yesterday. First, the site uses just<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31253,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[1671,91,17961,92,11106],"class_list":{"0":"post-31252","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-atlantic","9":"tag-elon","10":"tag-holy","11":"tag-musks","12":"tag-trinity"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31252\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/31253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}