Quote: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.

---

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.

---

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.

Quote:Beneath a now-deleted post by a convicted French Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi militant, Grok on Monday advanced several false claims commonly made by people who deny Nazi Germany murdered 6 million Jews during the second world war.

The chatbot said in French that the gas chambers at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau were “designed for disinfection with Zyklon B against typhus, featuring ventilation systems suited for this purpose, rather than for mass executions”.

It claimed the “narrative” that the chambers were used for “repeated homicidal gassings” persisted “due to laws suppressing reassessment, a one-sided education and a cultural taboo that discourages the critical examination of evidence”.

The post was ultimately deleted but was still online, with more than 1m views at 6pm on Wednesday, French media reported. More than 1 million people died at Auschwitz-Birkenau, most of them Jews. Zyklon B was the poison gas used to kill inmates in gas chambers.

In further comments, Grok referred to “lobbies” wielding “disproportionate influence through control of the media, political funding and dominant cultural narratives” to “impose taboos”, apparently echoing a well-known antisemitic trope.

Challenged by the Auschwitz Museum, the AI eventually back-pedalled, saying the reality of the Holocaust was “indisputable” and it “rejected denialism outright”. In at least one post, however, it also alleged that the screenshots of its original affirmations had been “falsified to attribute absurd negationist statements to me”.

(November 20, 2025 at 1:52 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Somebody's going to get fired when elmo sees that number.

Quote:Border Patrol is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with ‘suspicious’ travel patterns

The U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious, The Associated Press has found.

The predictive intelligence program has resulted in people being stopped, searched and in some cases arrested. A network of cameras scans and records vehicle license plate information, and an algorithm flags vehicles deemed suspicious based on where they came from, where they were going and which route they took. Federal agents in turn may then flag local law enforcement.

Suddenly, drivers find themselves pulled over — often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener blocking the view. They are then aggressively questioned and searched, with no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar.

Once limited to policing the nation’s boundaries, the Border Patrol has built a surveillance system stretching into the country’s interior that can monitor ordinary Americans’ daily actions and connections for anomalies instead of simply targeting wanted suspects.

Under the Trump administration’s heightened immigration enforcement efforts, CBP is now poised to get more than $2.7 billion to build out border surveillance systems such as the license plate reader program by layering in artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.

The result is a mass surveillance network with a particularly American focus: cars.

“They are collecting mass amounts of information about who people are, where they go, what they do, and who they know … engaging in dragnet surveillance of Americans on the streets, on the highways, in their cities, in their communities,” Nicole Ozer, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Democracy at UC Law San Francisco, said in response to the AP’s findings. “These surveillance systems do not make communities safer.”

https://apnews.com/article/immigration-b...32d32098cd

(November 21, 2025 at 12:21 am)Angrboda Wrote:

Quote:On Wednesday, one day after a federal court struck down Texas’ new Republican gerrymander, Judge Jerry Smith, a Ronald Reagan appointee, published his belated dissent from the 2–1 decision. It is one of the most unhinged opinions ever published by an American jurist. Smith’s 104-page screed, released a day after the majority opinion, is a rancid gumbo of feverish conspiracy theories and character assassination: He invokes the liberal Jewish philanthropist George Soros no fewer than 17 times, deriding the plaintiff’s expert witness as a “Soros operative” who draws millions from “his Soros piggybank.” He accuses Soros and his son Alex of having “their hands all over” the case, darkly warning that the plaintiffs’ lawyers were doing the bidding of their “Soros connections” and the “Democrat Party.” He impugns the integrity of his own colleagues on the bench, including a Donald Trump appointee who sided against him, charging them with “disingenuously false” claims to serve “Soros a victory” on “a silver platter.”