Elon Musk’s Grokipedia cites Stormfront — a neo-Nazi forum — dozens of times, study finds

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.

Triedman is a former senior privacy engineer for the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia, and still does part-time contract work for one of its affiliates — which he disclosed in the paper — but he said he did the work independently. His co-author, Alexios Mantzarlis, is the director of Cornell’s Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative and the former director of the International Fact-Checking Network, a nonprofit organization.

Overall, the researchers found that Grokipedia includes 12,522 citations to online sources that previous academic research has deemed as having very low credibility. And they found that Grokipedia cites those domains three times as often as Wikipedia.

Unlike Wikipedia, Grokipedia centralizes its editing process. Users can submit suggested edits to Grokipedia, but instead of assigning a group of volunteer community editors to decide on the edits, xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, controls whether or not a certain edit is approved and implemented on the website. The process of review is not entirely transparent, but the company has suggested that Grok, an artificial intelligence chatbot, plays a part in reviewing edit submissions. When a user submits an edit, it is approved or denied with “Grok Feedback.”

In an article about a Virginia-based white nationalist publication, Grokipedia cites and links to Stormfront seven times, with the links appearing at the bottom of the article under “references.” A Wikipedia article with the same title cites mainstream sources, such as Newsweek magazine. The Grokipedia version also uses euphemisms such as “advancement of peoples of European descent” in place of labels such as “white nationalist” preferred by Wikipedia editors, and the Grokipedia version is about 15 times longer than the Wikipedia article.

The Grokipedia article for the 1998 film “American History X” cites and links to Stormfront six times, summarizing how people on Stormfront’s discussion forum view the film. The Wikipedia entry for the film does not cite Stormfront, instead relying on movie websites and news publications. (In the film, Edward Norton plays an American neo-Nazi, a role that earned him an Academy Award nomination.)

The research from Triedman and Mantzarlis is a preprint, meaning the paper has not been vetted by other academic researchers, but NBC News was able to verify some of the findings by searching Grokipedia and checking references for individual articles. The authors also published their data and methods online.

The analysis is the first comprehensive attempt to comb through Grokipedia’s more than 880,000 articles, and it says that, on some topics, Musk’s site uses sources that have explicit racial prejudice, treating them as authoritative.

Wikipedia, as a rule, relies on published secondary sources and tells contributors to avoid doing their own original research. It also prohibits some sources that it views as unreliable or untrustworthy. But Grokipedia is different.

Musk and xAI, which released Grokipedia, did not respond to a request for comment on the Cornell analysis. The email inbox at xAI for media inquiries has an autoreply that says: “Legacy Media Lies.”

Stormfront, created by a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, is one of the internet’s oldest and most prominent neo-Nazi message boards. Several mass shooters, including a Norwegian neo-Nazi who killed 77 people, have been registered Stormfront users, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization.

A message left with a Stormfront voicemail was not immediately returned Wednesday.

Musk has a history of expressing antisemitic and racist theories. In 2022, he endorsed the “great replacement” theory that Jews were plotting to bring nonwhite immigrants to the United States. (His post about it is still up.) He has smeared Haitian immigrants as cannibals and attacked airlines for trying to recruit Black pilots. In January, Musk used a gesture at a rally that many historians viewed as a Nazi salute, and days later he urged Germans to “move beyond” Nazi guilt. Musk later said those framing the gesture as a Nazi salute were using “dirty tricks.”

Musk’s social media app, X, formerly Twitter, has also become a hub for neo-Nazi influencers, after Musk restored some previously banned accounts. X also placed advertisements in the search results for extremist hashtags such as #whitepower.

Musk created Grokipedia as an explicitly political project after having criticized Wikipedia as too left-wing. He took up the idea after a suggestion from Trump White House AI czar David Sacks.

Wikipedia, founded in 2001, is written and edited by volunteers, many of whom are pseudonymous. It is among the most-visited websites in the world.

Grokipedia used articles from Wikipedia as a foundation, republishing some of them word for word with a disclaimer saying the content was “adapted from Wikipedia” under a Creative Commons license. But it also rewrote other topics top to bottom with the help of Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok. Musk said one priority was to de-emphasize the traditional news media as sources.

“The goal here is to create an open source, comprehensive collection of all knowledge,” Musk said last month on X. He has said the website will be “super important for civilization.”

Many articles have a different slant from Wikipedia. The Grokipedia entry for Adolf Hitler, for example, goes for 13,000 words before it mentions the Holocaust by name, according to an NBC News count, while Wikipedia mentions it in the first paragraph of its article.

Triedman said it is not clear why Grokipedia has published articles as it has.

“They’ve expressed intentions to be more transparent going forward. Right now, the methodology is not very transparent,” he said.

The Cornell researchers scraped nearly the entirety of Grokipedia’s content in late October, gathering more than 883,000 articles for analysis.

They found that Wikipedia and Grokipedia rely on some of the same sources, with 57 internet domains showing up in the top 100 source lists for both encyclopedias. But the two sites often diverge, especially when it comes to sources Wikipedia editors consider unreliable or even blacklist.

About 5.5% of Grokipedia articles include at least one citation to a source that is blacklisted in the English-language Wikipedia community, the researchers found.

Infowars, for example, is generally prohibited as a source on Wikipedia, and its founder, Alex Jones, faces a $1.5 billion defamation judgment over false claims that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut was a hoax. But Grokipedia cites Infowars and links to it as a source, including for a baseless conspiracy theory that the Clintons are murderers who have a “body count.” (Wikipedia has a parallel article on the same subject that does not mention Infowars.)

VDare is likewise generally banned as a source on Wikipedia, but Grokipedia cites it for several articles, usually about white supremacists or about VDare itself.

The researchers said they found 1,050 citations in which Grokipedia links to itself: specifically, to publicly shared conversations that had occurred between X users and the Grok chatbot. In one example, Grokipedia cites as a source a Grok chatbot conversation in which a user started by asking Grok to “dig up some dirt” on a Belgian politician. The researchers did not draw conclusions about the accuracy of those 1,050 citations.

“We believe there is much future work to complete in this area,” they wrote.