01 Dec 2025 Subjugating news and information to partisan interests

In 1960s Britain it was common for travelling salesmen (hardly ever women) to go from door to door selling subscriptions to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Twenty-four volumes whose cost could be spread over monthly repayments.

Parents who could afford it, and even those who couldn’t, coveted Britannica as a reliable source of both general and specialised knowledge. Owning it was also something of a status symbol.

First published between 1768 and 1771 in Edinburgh, Scotland, Britannica was the longest-running encyclopaedia in print in the English language, with an undisputed claim to scholarly authority. In 1932, Britannica adopted a policy of “continuous revision”, with every article updated according to a fixed schedule. Then, in 2016, the economics of the digital era intervened, and it published exclusively online.

Britannica was trustworthy. Its articles were accurate, attributed, reviewed and revised. In short, it was reliable. Wikipedia, its digital clone, basked in its glory, and had the advantage of being freely accessible. But then online misinformation, disinformation, and fake news turned everything on its head. Today, no source of information is sacrosanct.

Enter a tech-robber-baron, who is trying to replace Wikipedia and Britannica with his own version of the sum of all human knowledge. In October, Elon Musk launched his AI-powered Grokipedia, which he described as the “truth and nothing but the truth”. Yet, according to The Guardian newspaper (3 November 2025), “users found Grokipedia lifted large chunks from the website it intended to usurp, contained numerous factual errors and seemed to promote Musk’s favoured right-wing talking points.”

Not that Wikipedia is unbiased. Writing in The Conversation (15 October 2025), Taha Yasseri, Workday Professor of Technology and Society, Trinity College Dublin, pointed out, “Wikipedia’s content is written and maintained by volunteers who can only cite material that already exists in other published sources, since the platform prohibits original research. This rule, which is designed to ensure that facts can be verified, means that Wikipedia’s coverage inevitably reflects the biases of the media, academia and other institutions it draws from.”

What to do? First, everyone should check, doublecheck, and check again: a kind of information triangulation using multiple sources and methods to increase the likely validity of the findings. Of course, if the data comes from controlled sources (say Truth Social, Fox News, Russia-1, Xinhua News Agency, etc.), the picture is going to be skewed. For news, independent journalism is one answer but, like Wikipedia and Britannica, it too faces attacks on its integrity and veracity.

As long ago as 2018, Reporters Without Borders wrote, “Political control of the media, subjugation of news and information to private interests, the growing influence of corporate actors who escape democratic control, online mass disinformation, violence against reporters and editors, and the undermining of quality journalism threaten the exercise of the right to knowledge. Any attempt to abusively limit it, whether by force, technology or legal means, is a violation of the right to freedom of opinion.”

Elon Musk’s attempt to subvert the knowledge commons via Grokipedia is doubtless doomed. But it won’t be the last time a rich petty tyrant tries to damage democracy by manipulating information and knowledge.

Composite photo: Gguy and Monticello/Shutterstock