Elon Musk Attacks Wikipedia: Too Many Facts

Elon Musk is calling for a Wikipedia boycott because he believes the online encyclopedia is too woke. However, the multibillionaire likely has something else in mind.

How convenient it would be if we could simply ignore Elon Musk. Here he goes again, that crazy multibillionaire who is always spouting some nonsense on X. Unfortunately, ignoring him isn’t possible, as he not only spreads hate, hate speech and disinformation himself, but also shares similar content posted by other X users, amplifying the posts through his X algorithm. As a result, he has enormous influence that extends far beyond the platform.

Now Musk is setting his sights on Wikipedia, and incidentally, this is not the first time. Amid the online encyclopedia’s current appeal for donations, Musk is urging people not to donate, claiming the site is too “woke.” This accusation is strange, as Wikipedia, a longstanding institution and one of the top 10 most visited websites in the world, has not previously been suspected of being overly cautious in what it writes. In the past, criticism has tended to show up when companies or lobbyists overtly sugarcoat articles concerning them. Critics have also pointed out that the community responsible for writing the texts tends to be predominantly white and male.

Musk probably has a different agenda. He sees Wikipedia as annoying competition. The era when dictionaries were compiled solely by manually collecting terms and knowledge is coming to an end. Text generators with artificial intelligence have long been superior in terms of quantity and speed when facts are not the priority.

Moreover, AI text generators can be designed to convey political views. A Wikipedia clone in a right-wing, libertarian style that skillfully presents conspiracy theories? With AI from the likes of Musk, this would not be a problem. What’s more, these texts, like much other online content, could in turn be used as training data for other AI, thereby propagating language and content. This would serve as an additional, more discreet means of spreading hate, hate speech and disinformation.