This month on Show & Tell, we spoke to Renée DiResta about how she discovered that Grokipedia had stopped updating, and why Musk’s Wikipedia alternative is more than just “a culture war artifact.” Even if the AI-edited encyclopedia fades away, “something like it will exist at some point, and we may as well get in and figure out how to audit it now,” she said.
DiResta is an associate research professor at Georgetown and a globally recognized leader in investigating organized digital deception. She is the author of Invisible Rulers, one of the sharpest books out there on the evolving politics of communication. (Alexios reviewed it here.)
We discussed her recent article for Lawfare with Ronald Robertson about Grokipedia’s silent edit freeze, which has been ongoing since April.
DiResta stumbled on this story while probing the editing queue of Elon Musk’s AI encyclopedia. She set up a Claude agent to identify Grokipedia entries that didn’t meet encyclopedic standards, ask Grok (the chatbot) to rewrite them accordingly, then submit edit requests to Grokipedia. She noticed that the flow appeared broken, with edits going unreviewed for weeks – even for things as uncontroversial and encyclopedia-worthy as the date of SpaceX’s IPO or the Knicks winning the NBA championship.
You can watch the episode above or on our YouTube channel.
We also discussed the overall state of platform transparency regarding influence operations and digital deception. Having been critical of X’s highly reduced disclosures, DiResta was more positive about Anthropic’s most recent threat report and how it might be used as a starting point for further investigation. DiResta told us her most indispensable tool is the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and joined us in grumbling about the sorry state of digital ad libraries.
About Show & Tell
Show & Tell is a monthly podcast hosted by Indicator co-founders Alexios Mantzarlis and Craig Silverman.
We talk about digital investigations with leading journalists, OSINT investigators, threat analysts, and trust and safety researchers. We aim to be as practical as possible by having our guests walk us through one or more investigations or analyses they actually worked on.
This is our eighth episode. Our previous episodes featured:
Caitlin Ostroff and Neil Mehta, investigative reporters at The Wall Street Journal.
Hal Triedman, a privacy and security researcher at Cornell Tech.
Omer Benjakob, disinformation and cyber reporter for Haaretz.
Barbara Marcolini, visual investigator with Amnesty International's Evidence Lab.
Kolina Koltai, senior researcher and trainer at Bellingcat.
Clara Jiménez Cruz, CEO of Maldita.es.
Jeff Horwitz, investigative reporter for Reuters.
We hope you enjoy and learn from the conversation with Renée. Catch every episode by subscribing to our YouTube channel. We're also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Have a suggestion for who we should feature next? Email us.
