Most of what appears online about Tower Hamlets is malicious, ill-informed lying drivel. Elon Musk is set to make this a whole lot worse with the launch of his neo-Nazi version of an “encyclopaedia”.

Grokipedia is produced by Musk’s equivalent of the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. It has about the same level of nuance and objectivity you would expect from a project overseen by Joseph Goebbels.

The entry on the London Borough of Tower Hamlets is a mix of historically and factually accurate information about the borough and political commentary which is identical to what every racist nutjob on X says.

Once you get past the half-arsed account of the area’s history, much of the material is about how Lutfur Rahman got elected. It sets out to give a clear impression that his election was illegitimate and made possible only by religious sectarianism, coercion and intimidation of a homogenous Bangladeshi population.

It mentions “corrupt and illegal practices such as vote-rigging, bribery, and undue spiritual influence via religious intimidation” (source: The Daily Telegraph, formerly a serious Tory paper and now an unreadable far right propaganda sheet)

There are nine paragraphs of this stuff and nothing at all about the Roman settlement in the area, the Match Women’s strike, how Musk’s Nazi role models dropped V2s on the borough, the 173 people who died in Bethnal Green tube station or the Poplar councillors.

The casual reader and the racist seeking to have their prejudices confirmed will conclude that Sharia patrols stalk the streets and the area is a hotbed of violent Islamism. This is presented as contributing to something called “white flight”. What actually happened is that lots of the older white residents bought their council homes, sold them and moved out to Essex where they could buy larger properties.  The consequence of this is that lots of old council places are now let out by scumbag landlords at extortionate rents.

Of course, in Musk world Muslims and migrants are all sexual predators, so there is an extended section on grooming gangs and “reluctance to pursue due to fears of racism accusations.” I can say with 100% certainty that this is false. I sat through many meetings on this with police, social workers and other agencies and in every single case the ethnicity of perpetrators and victims was part of the discussion. There was no cover up.

The whole entry is a relentless torrent of bollocks. “Pro-Palestinian solidarity events have further accentuated divisions.” Anyone who attended them knows that they brought the community together.

I chose to see what Grokipedia had to say about a place I know well and was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. However, it deliberately trawls reactionary sources to give misleading, racist, Islamophobic narratives to racists and the gullible. It is not so much the information source of the modern world as a reinvention of Der Stürmer.