Molly White's Citation Needed - Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia

Episode Date: January 2, 2025

The world's richest man has joined a growing chorus of right-wing voices attacking Wikipedia as part of an intensifying campaign against free and open access information. Originally published on January 2, 2025.

I'm Molly White, and you're listening to the audio feed for the Citation Needed Newsletter. You can see the text version of the newsletter online at citation needed.news. Elon Musk and the Wright's War on Wikipedia. The world's richest man has joined a growing chorus of right-wing voices attacking Wikipedia as part of an intensifying campaign against free and open access information. This issue was originally published on January 2, 2020. When Elon Musk launched his latest crusade against Wikipedia this Christmas Eve, it wasn't just another of the billionaire's frequent Twitter tantrums. His gripes about the community

written encyclopedia exposed something far more significant, the growing efforts by America's most powerful right-wing figures to rewrite and control the flow of information. While Musk's involvement began with grievances about his own coverage on the website, his recent attacks reveal his growing role in the broader campaign to delegitimize Wikipedia, and the rights frustration with platforms that remain resilient against such control. Stop donating to Wikipedia, Elon Musk urged in a tweet sent in the early hours of December 24. This was only the opening shot. Over the following week, the world's richest man and the United States' new, unelected, first buddy, unleashed a barrage of attacks aimed at convincing his 200-million

Twitter followers to boycott the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the nonprofit supporting the volunteer-maintained Wikipedia project. While Musk's grudge against Wikipedia stretches back years, his latest campaign borrowed its arguments entirely from fellow travelers in the far-right conspiracy theory swamp he increasingly calls home. First was Chaya Reichich, also known as libs of TikTok, who on December 23rd screenshoted a pie chart of budget categories from the Wikimedia Foundation's 2023-24 annual plan. Apparently, not bothering to read past the labels, Ritchik dashed off a tweet, condemning the foundation for spending $50 million on, quote, diversity, equity, and inclusion, the Wright's latest boogeyman, and urging her own substantial follower base to, quote,

stop donating to Wocopedia. Musk agreed, amplifying her post with the comment, quote, stop donating to Wokeopedia until they restore balance to their editing authority. The screenshot showed a pie chart with categories including equity and safety and inclusion, which were apparently what Ritchik mistook for DEI. Two days later, Musk retweeted Mario Knopfel, who had ripped off Richick's same post to produce his own, with the bold and all caps headline,

quote, Wikipedia blows $50 million on wokeness, Nauphill added, quote, that's $50 million for DEI instead of, you know, improving the actual site. Sure, inclusion is nice, but maybe they could use some of that money to ensure they're a reliable source of information first? Just a thought. What Noffel, Reichick, and Musk either failed to understand or deliberately misrepresented was that these budget categories they've dismissed as DEI directly support Wikipedia's reliability. The funding goes to programs to expand coverage of underrepresented topics, recruit editors with expertise in neglected subject areas,

develop tools to identify and counter-coordinated disinformation campaigns, improve article and source reliability, and protect the project and its editors from attempts to censor or restrict access to Wikipedia content. Far from detracting from Wikipedia's mission, these programs work to directly address the types of concerns Musk and others raise. Then, in the early hours of December 31st, Musk reposted a video from a self-described, quote, conspiracy realist slash coincidence analyzer account named B. Gates is a psycho, which had in turn taken the video from anti-Semitic

conspiracy theorist and self-described, quote, OASint journalist exposing globalism, Ian Carroll. Quote, no more donations to Wikipedia until they start being truthful, Musk added, atop a video where Carol claimed that, quote, someone deleted all of Bill Clinton's connections to Jeffrey Epstein from Wikipedia, suggesting that Clinton himself was behind the edits. This, again, was a complete misrepresentation. The text was moved, not deleted, and not likely by Bill Clinton. If Carol had cared to look at the public article editing history,

he would have seen that the extremely long biographical article on Clinton was in fact split, as overlong articles often are, into separate subtopic articles on Bill Clinton's sexual assault and misconduct allegations and post-presidency of Bill Clinton, both of which are linked from the primary page. The Epstein-related section was restored to the primary Clinton article by a different editor three weeks later, shortly after Carol published his video, but months before Musk re-shared it. Musk followed up the Epstein video retweet two hours later with a retweet of a video from an account called End Wokeness, which is possibly run by white nationalist Jack Posobiat's. The video was a clip from a three-year-old interview by The Epic Times with Larry Sanger,

a jilted co-founder of Wikipedia who left about a year after its creation, and who has created a string of failed Wikipedia competitors in the more than 20 years since. Sanger's original complaints were about Wikipedia's whole ethos, namely that the project doesn't limit editing to subject matter experts or other authority figures. However, over the last five to ten years, his grievances have shifted, and Sanger now mostly complains that Wikipedia has become, quote, leftist propaganda, primarily due to his concerns that Wikipedia articles don't cite right-leaning publications like Fox or the Daily Mail as much as he believes they ought.

This axe grinding, paired with the appeal to authority in his co-founder title, has earned him airtime on the right-wing media circuit, including on Tucker Carlson and elsewhere on Fox News, on Christopher Rufo's substack, and generally in the same places he's complained are not considered sufficiently reliable for Wikipedia. Musk's recent Twitter rampage reveals a man with a grudge against Wikipedia, looking for anything to support his position, regardless of accuracy. While Musk once spoke reverently of Wikipedia, you have to dig back years to find it, to tweets in 2017 like, I love Wikipedia, just gets better over time. And in 2021, when he wrote, Happy Birthday Wikipedia, so glad you exist. His more recent mentions of the site include multiple direct appeals to founder and current WMF board member Jimmy Wales, beginning in 2022, to complain that the site is, quote, losing its objectivity, is, quote, overly controlled by mainstream media and, quote, has a non-trivial left-wing bias. He's bashed the site at least 10 times

since then as Wocopedia and lamented its, quote, capture by the, quote, woke mind virus. His requests that people not donate to the Wikimedia Foundation date back at least a year. But why have Musk and others on the right chosen Wikipedia as a favorite punching bag? Control The rise of the MAGA right in the United States has sparked some startling changes in attitudes towards press freedom and freedom of expression. Although many on the right, including Musk, have styled themselves as valiant defenders of free speech, their actions expose them as opposite, only willing to defend speech they find agreeable, while hostile towards and desperate to clamp down on criticism or opposing views. Musk, for example, has directed that cisgender be blocklisted on Twitter as a, quote, slur,

and posts by most accounts that contain the word are automatically hidden from view, unlike posts containing the long list of slurs he is apparently deemed acceptable. He has brought strategic lawsuits against public participation, against critics, including one dismissed by a federal judge as clearly intended to, quote, punish the nonprofit center for countering digital hate for CCDH publication, that criticized X-Corp or Twitter, and perhaps in order to dissuade others who might wish to engage in such criticism.

He spent $44 billion to acquire Twitter, ostensibly over concerns that conservative voices were being unfairly silenced, but really so that he could be the one to dictate which speech was and was not allowed on the platform. Similar attacks on speech are becoming only more common throughout the American right, with President-elect Trump's long-standing on

hostility to the media escalating on a rapid clip. In recent months, Trump has suggested he wouldn't mind if reporters were shot, threatened to jail journalists, editors, and publishers who refused to reveal confidential sources, threatened to investigate or pull broadcasting licenses for news organizations that reported on him unflatteringly, and filed slap lawsuits of his own against news publications and pollsters. This hostility to information sources outside the control extends far beyond the media. Right-wing groups have launched coordinated campaigns to ban books from schools and libraries, particularly those discussing race, gender, or LGBT topics. They've pushed legislation like the Kids' Online Safety Act that, while framed as protecting children, would require

platforms to restrict access to information deemed harmful or inappropriate for minors, which is likely to include resources for LGBT youth and information about reproductive or gender-affirming health care, sexual education, or mental health. And they've supported state-level laws requiring internet platforms to implement age restrictions that threaten privacy and are vulnerable to weaponization against content deemed obscene. The common thread connecting these efforts is not protecting children or promoting so-called family values, but controlling what information people can access. But neither Trump, Musk, nor anyone on the right, can control Wikipedia as they wish. A 2022 tweet from a New York Post reporter, musing about how much Musk would have to spend to buy

Wikipedia, was met with a clear rebuke from Jimmy Wales, quote, not for sale. The site later echoed the sentiment in its fundraising appeals, nodding at the idea that Musk could just buy Wikipedia like he did with Twitter, when it reassured potential donors that, quote, there is no danger that someone will buy Wikipedia. and turn it into their personal playground. Attempts to coerce changes to Wikipedia's content via the legal system would likely fall flatter than lawsuits Musk and his ilk have threatened or filed against critics

because the Wikimedia Foundation has proven itself remarkably willing to fight back against formidable adversaries. In 2017, the Wikimedia Foundation denied Turkey's attempts to force the site to alter information about the Turkish government's support for terrorist organizations. When Turkey blocked Wikipedia access in response, the foundation took the case to the Turkish Supreme Court, and access was restored in January 2020, after the court ruled the ban violated human rights to freedom of expression. The foundation has likewise resisted threats from the United States,

refusing to submit to legal threats from the FBI in 2010 after they demanded Wikipedia stop using an image of the FBI seal, and in 2015 filing suit against the NSA over its upstream mass surveillance program, kicking off a years-long legal battle with the agency, which was eventually decided in favor of the NSA. This isn't to say Wikipedia is impervious to influence. While obvious vandalism and heavy-handed manipulation attempts typically fail quickly, more subtle influence campaigns can succeed, at least for a time, by working within Wikipedia's rules and social dynamics.

Coordinated editing campaigns have sometimes pushed biased content, particularly in areas of the project that attract less attention. Governments have been accused of attempting to manipulate Wikipedia to favor their interests or spread propaganda, while paid editing firms have manipulated articles about corporations and politicians. But Wikipedia's transparency makes manipulation visible and correctable. Every edit is publicly law. disgust, and reversible, and a decree by a government or billionaire does not ultimately determine

which content stays or goes. While some news outlets and other entities have proven willing to back down in the face of threats and demands from powerful figures or have lacked the resources to do anything but Wikipedia has not. This resilience against control helps explain why figures like Musk find Wikipedia so infuriating. They can buy platforms, threaten long, lawsuits or pressure advertisers, but they cannot simply purchase or coerce control over Wikipedia. Source Reliability A common complaint from Larry Sanger and others on the right has been Wikipedia's supposed banning of right-leaning sources.

The reality is more complex. Wikipedia's source reliability guidelines focus on accuracy and editorial practices, not political alignment. For instance, when the Daily Mail was deprecated as a source of, in 2017, it wasn't because of its right-wing stance, but because of documented cases where it published false stories without correction, fabricated quotes, and manipulated images. Meanwhile, right-leaning publications with stronger fact-checking practices, like the Wall Street Journal and The Telegraph, remain widely used across Wikipedia.

These nuances often get lost in politically charged discussions about Wikipedia's source reliability. Take the case of Fox News. While its opinion programming is generally considered unreliable due to numerous documented falsehoods, its straight news reporting is often deemed acceptable for topics outside of politics and science. Similarly, while the New York Post is considered unreliable for political coverage due to its tabloid approach and history of fabrications, it's still sometimes used for entertainment coverage. To reduce repetitive conversations about commonly cited sources, Wikipedia maintains a list of perenniated. sources, publications that are frequently used and whose reliability is a recurring topic of time-consuming

discussions about source usability. The list segments publications, from generally reliable in its areas of expertise, to generally unreliable, meaning the use is normally not acceptable, or, more rarely, deprecated, where use is rarely acceptable. However, source reliability is still taken case-by-case on Wikipedia, depending heavily on not just the publisher and its editorial practices, but also the statements a citation is intended to support, and the specifics of the article being cited. There are articles published in generally reliable publications that shouldn't be used as sources on Wikipedia, and there are articles published in generally unreliable or even deprecated publications that are reasonably used as sources. This controversial page,

documenting the general view of reliability for some popular publications is anything but the canonical list of approved or banned sources many of its critics claim it to be. Whether a source is usable on Wikipedia is a case-by-case decision, as a page itself makes clear, in a section with a heading what this page is, which reads a list of sources whose suitability for most slash general purposes has been discussed repeatedly.

The page goes on to list what this page is not, which includes a list of pre-approved sources that can always be used without regard for the ordinary rules of editing, a list of banned sources that can never be used or should be removed on site, a list of biased or unbiased sources, a list of sources that are guaranteed to be 100% correct regardless of context, a list of every source that has been discussed, and a list of sources that have never been discussed, or whose reliability should be obvious to most editors.

Some sources could perhaps be more accurately described as banned on Wikipedia, as in you can't even save the page if your edit adds a link to one of those sites, but this is a last resort to prevent abuse. This block listing is mainly used to prevent links to sites that are regularly spammed onto Wikipedia, such as crowdfunding or fundraising sites like GoFundMe and Kickstarter, or websites containing extremely objectionable material with little encyclopedic merit, such as Gore and other shock sites, or fishing websites or other scams, and so forth. With rare exception, when I see right-wing complaints about, quote, banned sources on Wikipedia,

they're not complaining about block-listed sources, but rather sources deem generally unreliable or deprecated. These decisions aren't made lightly and are frequently revisited. There have been over 50 discussions about the Daily Mail's reliability, for example, with both sides being vehemently argued. There also tends to be a common misconception, or perhaps deception, that only right-leaning sources are labeled unreliable, and only left-leaning sources reliable. While there are more unreliable sources on the list that lean far to the right than to the left,

this is more a product of the post-truths willingness on the right to publish falsehoods that are anywhere from reckless to intentionally fabricated. organizations like One American News Network, Newsmax, and Project Veritas, all of which have repeatedly published false claims, have made their way onto the list thanks to this predilection. This is not an exclusively right-wing phenomenon. I myself found myself embroiled in long discussion several years ago about whether a very liberal website should be described as fake news on Wikipedia, and it is, as of writing. But it's far more common on the right. A mere glance at the perennial sources list is enough to disprove the suggestion that it slices cleanly along right-left lines.

Left-wing publications like Counterpunch, The Daily Coast, and Occupy Democrats are in the unreliable list. Both right-leaning publications like National Review and Washington Examiner, and left-leaning Media Matters for America, Rolling Stone, and Think Progress are labeled partisan sources. and right-leaning outlets like the Telegraph, The Hill, Reason, and the Wall Street Journal have earned spots in the generally reliable section. Claims that Wikipedia systematically excludes right-wing viewpoints also ignore how differing viewpoints are handled on the project. When covering controversial topics, Wikipedia editors are expected to describe significant viewpoints

in proportion to their prominence in reliable sources, even when those viewpoints are outside the mainstream. For example, Wikipedia's article on climate change includes skeptical positions, but cites them primarily through scientific publications and other reliable coverage, rather than through fringe publications or those with poor reputations for fact-checking and scientific rigor. Similarly, articles about electoral fraud claims cite conservative perspectives, but through court filings and reliable reporting rather than through sources that have repeatedly published debunked claims. Scratch the surface, and complaints that Wikipedia does not describe these viewpoints at all

are often revealed to be complaints that Wikipedia does not adopt these viewpoints as true, or treat widely debunked hypotheses with similar weight as broad scientific consensus. Personal grievances While these days Musk frames his crusade against Wikipedia as a principled stand against bias, the timeline of his complaints reveals a more personal motivation. His earliest grievances targeted his own Wikipedia biography, which accurately, but much to his chagrin, describes him as a, quote, early investor in Tesla rather than as a founder. He's also complained about the Tesla article, which he gripes, quote, glorifies one of Tesla's

actual founders. He has repeatedly claimed his Wikipedia article was written by his, quote, enemies, and has joined his fans' complaints about the portion of his Wikipedia page outlining his role in spreading misinformation, bigotry, and conspiracy theories, agreeing with one who suggested, quote, someone paid to have this written. He has boasted so often that he has not tried to, quote, curate his Wikipedia biography, by which he seems to mean edited himself or pay someone to do so on his behalf, that I wonder if he doth protest too much. As a very highly watched Wikipedia page, attempts by Musk or his lackeys to insert false or unverifiable portions of the auto-hageography he

repeats elsewhere, would likely meet considerable resistance, as demonstrated by the battles between Musk fanboys, hired or otherwise, and Wikipedia editors that rage in the edit history and talk page. This grandstanding rings hollow given his track record. When faced with unfavorable coverage elsewhere, Musk has shown no hesitation to exert direct control through legal threats and pressure campaigns. Only after failing to rewrite his own history on Wikipedia, did Musk's criticism expand to broader complaints, such as Wikipedia's supposed systemic bias. This crusade gained momentum through several high-profile incidents

that became right-wing flashpoints, each fueling his campaign when the site's coverage didn't match his desired framing. In July 2022, in one of his first tweets complaining about the site beyond where it mentioned him, Musk and others fell for the false statement by Mike Zernovich, that, quote, Wikipedia changed the definition of recession to favor the Biden regime and then locked the page. An article screenshot provided by Zernovich featured texts that had remained unchanged since the Trump administration. But that didn't stop a right-wing firestorm, joined by Musk, where people claimed that Wikipedia had removed the common definition of recession as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. Wikipedia had not. After Musk replied to a tweet by Pirate Wire's owner Mike Solana to write, quote,

Wikipedia is losing its objectivity, tagging Jimmy Wales, Wales pointed Musk to a note posted to the talk page by frustrated Wikipedia editors, dealing with the onslaught of complaints he'd helped to stir up. The note read, attention new visitors to this page. If you were about to hate post, quote, the definition of a recession is two quarters of declining GDP, the article already says, that, so this would be a waste of time unless you have further suggestions for improving the article.

If you are here to complain that Wikipedia changed the definition to favor the Biden administration, please don't, because one, the article has mentioned both the two-quarter and NBER definitions for years, and that hasn't changed recently. And two, after discussion from editors from a diversity of political perspectives, the introduction has actually been changed, so it emphasizes the two-quarter definition a little more, which we expect you'll find satisfactorily neutral. But feel free to leave a note if you read the article and still have concerns. Quote, reading too much Twitter nonsense is making you stupid, added Wales. Call me next week if you want a real discussion.

Later that year, Musk complained, quote, Wikipedia has a non-trivial left-wing bias in response to a tweet by Ian Miles Chong, who observed that there was a deletion discussion underway for the Twitter files article, adding, quote, these people work hand in hand with the MSM to shape the narrative. Anyone can propose a Wikipedia article for deletion, triggering such a discussion. Although deletion discussions normally last seven days, this one was closed early, due to overwhelming consensus to keep the article. Neither Chong nor Musk noted this outcome, and in fact a year later,

Chong reposted Musk's reply to complain, quote, I still think about this post and how Wikipedia hasn't improved at all since the article. then. It's only gotten worse. Only days after his outrage that the controversy he was trying to stoke might not be covered on Wikipedia, Musk was then dismayed when a different controversy, with him at the center, was deemed sufficiently noteworthy for a Wikipedia page. Quote, a two-day suspension of maybe seven accounts for doxing got an actual Wikipedia page, he tweeted, referring to a Wikipedia article documenting the unexplained banning of 10 journalists who had reported on Musk. Twitter and Musk would later try to retroactively justify

the ban with a newly created rule against sharing real-time flight information, such as that posted by the Elon Jet Twitter account, and which was reshared by some of the targeted journalists. Spending Some of the ostensible concern about Wikipedia revolves around its spending, though not about the most recent bone-headed claims that Wikipedia is, quote, wasting $50 million, on quote, DEI that I've already addressed. Amusingly, the question of whether the Wikimedia Foundation's actual spending is justifiable is arguably Musk's most reasonable argument, but it's also one he hasn't brought

up in a long time. Quote, have you ever wondered why the Wikimedia Foundation wants so much money? It certainly isn't needed to operate Wikipedia. You can literally fit a copy of the entire text on your phone. So what's the money for? Inquiring minds want to know, wrote Musk in October. for 2023. Setting aside why Elon Musk is the one asking this question, the man who says he personally needs a pay package of 300 to 500 times the Wikimedia Foundation's annual budget for the upcoming

year, Musk betrays the complete lack of understanding for how software companies work as when he acquired Twitter and claimed it would work just fine if he fired nearly everyone based on absurd evaluations of their productivity. It hasn't. While the cost to simply host a 50-gibytes stripped-down copy of Wikipedia, or even the hundreds of terabytes of all content across all projects, might be comparatively low. Musk is apparently ignorant to the massive infrastructure costs for running a project like Wikipedia, which include maintaining and developing MediaWiki, which is the software that doesn't just display Wikipedia articles but also supports its editing interface, hardware, software,

and labor costs to keep one of the biggest sites online in the face of high traffic, regular issues and malicious attacks, costs to provide API access to high-volume consumers, including to train Musk's own AI endeavors, and so on. Wikimedia infrastructure costs are about 50% of the budget this year, and we're around the same percentage during the year Musk, Reichick, and others were complaining about. Besides infrastructure, other costs go to categories like equity, safety and integrity, renamed from last year's safety and inclusion, but before this whole kerfuffle, I will note, and effectiveness. These encompass broader projects around supporting the Wikimedia movement, the community of volunteer contributors that maintain these huge projects. You might think Musk and his

allies would be pleased to hear that a substantial portion of these funds go towards addressing the biases and gaps in coverage, the concerns they've highlighted. However, although the Wikimedia Foundation and its editing community readily acknowledge biases and gaps in the project's content and editor base, they typically have far more to do with underrepresentation of people in the global South, people of color, and women than they do with a lack of American right-wingers. Other expenditures go towards fighting disinformation and improving information reliability. Again, things that Musk and others might support if they were being genuine. Also, and mentioned by Musk is Wikimedia's recent focus on effectiveness, which focuses on

sustainability and maximizing the value of the dollars being spent. There certainly can be reasonable conversations about whether the Wikimedia Foundation really needs to spend $150 to $200 million each year. I suspect few have had as detailed conversations about whether there is a need for such spending and fundraising, or about the tone of fundraising emails and banners, or the ultimate purposes of the spending, as have Wikimedia's very own volunteer editing community, which has a rather peculiar and sometimes adversarial relationship with the Wikimedia Foundation. But why does Wikipedia need more than the cost to serve a 50-gigabyte file is not one such

reasonable conversation? Nor are some of the other talking points that tend to come up in these kinds of conversations. Like why does the Wikimedia Foundation pay employees six-figure salaries when they don't even pay their editors? And why do they need more money when they already have over $270 million, are another two I see a lot. I personally have shared some of the concerns about the magnitude of spending by the Wikimedia Foundation in the past and have disagreed with some of its allocations, but I also happily contributed money to the Wikimedia Foundation earlier this year, as I have in the past. The escalating attacks on Wikipedia from Elon Musk and other powerful figures on the American right follow a familiar pattern. First come the claims of bias, supported by cherry-picked or misrepresented examples. Then the demands for so-called balance, which in practice mean giving equal weight to fringe views or demonstrably false claims.

When these demands are refused, the attacks shift to the platform's legitimacy itself, its funding, its governance, its leaders, and its very right to exist as an independent entity. We've seen this playbook deployed against traditional media, with Trump labeling unfavorable coverage fake news while promoting outlets that parrot his claims. We've seen it in academia, where a so-called viewpoint diversity is weaponized to demand equal time for climate change denial or historical revisionism. And we've seen it in social media, where Musk himself spent $44 billion to seize control of Twitter after claiming it was biased against conservative views. Wikipedia's resilience to these tactics makes it both a model and a target. The very features that Musk and others criticize, its decentralized editing model,

rigorous sourcing requirements, and non-profit status, are what have allowed it to remain one of the internet's most trusted resources. But these same features make it an obstacle to those who seek to control the narrative. Wikipedia faces real challenges. Its relatively small editing community and difficulties attracting new editors, threats from AI-generated content, and regulatory proposals that could restrict its functioning or threaten members of its editing community. But as Other information sources fall to acquisition, intimidation, or other pressure, Wikipedia's stubborn independence becomes more vital than ever. The attacks from Musk and his allies aren't just about an online encyclopedia.

They're part of a broader assault on any information source that refuses to be controlled. Thanks for listening to this issue of the citation-needed newsletter. To learn how to support my work, visit mollywhite.net slash support. If you'd like to read the text versions of these episodes, sign up to receive the newsletter in your email, or support my work on a recurring basis. Go to citation needed. News.