Musk launches Grokipedia to rival ‘left-biased’ Wikipedia • FRANCE 24 English

Well, let’s uh talk now about the situation regarding Elon Musk uh launching something called Groipedia. It’s a crowdsourced online encyclopedia that the billionaire seeks to position his survival to. Yes, Wikipedia. It all rhymes. Um writing on social media, Musk said that Groipedia.com version 0.1 is now live. He promised that version 1.0 will be better uh by 10 times. I think I’m reading that correctly. Grocked’s goal is the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, said Musk. But there are doubts about this statement. Grock has made many errors and has shown a marked far-right bias, much like Musk and his friends. So, is this a new way to get to the heart of the matter or a platform to spread bias and propaganda masquerading as an information tool? I’ll just set that up for you and bring in now Kevin Gani, our foreign editor who’s got a far more precient analysis of this situation. Kedan, I’ll throw to you with this. Grock’s made mistakes on Twitter. Could we trust a Groipedia? Look, obviously it is powered in large part by Grock. So any mistakes that Grock would make, Groipedia would likely make. But I think the mistakes is one thing. And then there is the question as you uh mentioned that quote from Elon Musk, the question about whether it will say the truth or not. Uh, and as Elon Musk said that this was going to say the truth and only the truth and nothing but the truth, he also said that it was meant to purge out all propaganda. And that is exactly what he’s trying to do, which is uh go against Wikipedia, that he, his followers, and a lot of people in uh the United States on the right-wing and in MAGA circles, Make America Great Again, uh have said that Wikipedia is woke. Wikipedia has a liberal bias and that you cannot trust Wikipedia because it’s simply regurgitating the biases of the left-wing traditional media. And so what Elon Musk is trying to do is counter that and he said it very uh openly. But when you look at some of the entries of uh Groipedia, it’s very interesting to see that there is a tilt towards uh the right wing and even the far right. There are two examples that have been widely commented uh online. The first one is the entry about Adolf Hitler. If you look at the entry uh on Wikipedia, in the first paragraph, you have a mention of the Holocaust, the genocide of 6 million Jews under uh Adolf Hitler. Look at the uh Groipedia entry and the mention of the Holocaust only comes at the very end of the second paragraph way after a comment about how uh Hitler achieved rapid economic recovery for Germany. So you see that uh the order in which things are presented here are very different. Another very interesting example is the entry about George Floyd on Wikipedia. The first line uh of the entry tells you that George Floyd was a black man, an African-American man who was murdered by a white police officer. You look at the Groipedia entry and the first line is about the fact that he has a lengthy or had a lengthy criminal record. You do not see in the first two paragraph that he was an African-American man. You do not know that the police officer was white. And you have to wait pretty much towards the end of the second paragraph to even know that Derek Schovin, the police officer, was responsible for the murder and convicted and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison. So there again, a lot of biases if you will towards uh the right. There are other problems with Graipedia. One is that it’s powered by AI. So sometimes it gives the facts, sometimes it gives mistake. And the other criticism this time from Wikipedia is that well Graedia sometimes is simply repeating word for word what it finds on Wikipedia because Wikipedia is available publicly and AI uses some of that information. But already you’re seeing in the sort of right-wing online uh community a lot of praise for Elon Musk for starting Groipedia because again going back to the original criticism of Wikipedia on the right which is we are going to build something that is factual and actually what they’re doing is trying to build something that is in their words going to counter the liberal biases of Wikipedia. it is telling things along their propaganda or bias guideline, isn’t it? And that’s a very alarming uh road to be taking uh in my opinion as a humble journalist. Um Kevin, what does all this say about Elon Musk and his involvement in the information space? Well, this is really the latest attempt by uh Elon Musk to sort of offer a right leaning versions of available technological tools. And you saw the the first uh example of that when he took over Twitter and made it X. The first thing he did was reinstate right-wing figures that had been suspended or banned by Twitter at the time for spreading misinformation, for inciting violence, uh, including one person known as Donald Trump, the current president of the United States, who was suspended by Twitter uh back after the January 6th attack on the US capital. Uh, Grock is another example of that. Elon Musk has been public about the fact that sometimes he was asking Grock to tweak some of its answers because he didn’t like the answers. One famous example was the question, what is the greatest threat to civilization? The initial answer from Grock was misinformation and disinformation. Elon Musk on X commented under that response saying that’s a stupid response. I’ll take care of it of it. The next day you had a new answer from Gro to the same question. This time the greatest threat to civilization was the demographic collapse due to low fertility rates. We know that Elon Musk is very interested in fertility and in the propagation of population around the world and especially in the United States. All of this uh is more broadly uh in line with the fight by uh the right-wing uh in the United States of trying to take control of uh the information because and this is an old uh saying is if you control information, if you control knowledge, you have the power. Information is power. It’s scary, isn’t it?

Elon Musk’s company xAI has launched a website called Grokipedia to compete with online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which he and others on the American right wing have accused of ideological bias. But can Grok’s information be trusted? FRANCE 24’s International Affairs Editor Kethevane takes a look.
#ElonMusk #Wikipedia #Grokipedia

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34 comments

  1. Reminds me a bit of that Colbert line from when he hosted the White House correspondents dinner during the GWB presidency: "facts have a well known liberal bias".

  5. The editorial norms and dispute-resolution processes on Wikipedia often reward conformity to prevailing progressive rhetoric. Editors who repeatedly patrol controversial pages develop institutional power — they can impose sourcing standards selectively, lock pages, and revert edits under policy pretexts. This creates an environment where dissenting viewpoints are framed as bad-faith edits rather than legitimate alternative perspectives.

    Because Wikipedia is widely used as a quick reference, this gatekeeping has outsized consequences. Biased presentation of social, political, or historical subjects doesn’t just mislead individual readers; it shapes public discourse, classroom learning, and even other websites that republish content. When an influential, popular encyclopedia tilts consistently toward one ideological approach, it undermines the ideal of balanced, verifiable public knowledge.

  7. Wiki is a very reliable source of information and certainly not ‘left wing’ it’s apolitical. Only right wing nutters disagree with the truth and prefer conspiracy theories. The term ‘woke’ has lost its meaning as right wing nutters call anything ‘woke’ if it doesn’t fit their narrow false agenda.

  9. When they say it is "left biased" they mean that it is too accurate and they don't tolerate disinformation. When they say they want wikipedia to be more conservative they mean they want more misinformation.

  12. Ath…the Muskrat strikes again. He is completely deranged and needs a padded room far away from normal humans. His followers are out of their tiny minds.

  14. President OBAMA presidency was the most successful presidency in modern history not because of division in government it was because of his ambition to generate a global nations economic system right here in America as well as single term South America agreement that open a multi Sur-Sul-Sud three Continental free flow agreement of resources ! Always remember that blacks never campaign in South America or Australia yet has serious economic input in National bureaucratic framework

  18. 😂 anyone using grok or Wikipedia for anything remotely knowledgeable has serious issues point in fact Musk believes hes the smartest person on the planet but relys on ai to accomplish his goals… musk is using x Twitter as his own propaganda owning the platform and inserting his own opinions isnt fact checking

  25. Musk collects more welfare from our goverment being the richest man in the world. Disgusting!!! Musk stop polluting our skies and oceans!!!!

  28. This is not journalism, it's dripping with political bias. The presentator is a condescending tool.

  29. This isn't right wing it's AI looking for the truth. If you can't accept that maybe you need to look inside yourself.

Comments are closed.