Social media has transformed Holocaust denial. The traditional denial movement of the late twentieth century operated through small-circulation publications, obscure conferences, and specialist websites that required active effort to find. Social media has removed those friction points: denial content is algorithmically distributed to audiences who did not seek it out, denial arguments are compressed into shareable formats optimised for virality, and the architecture of the major platforms has consistently prioritised engagement over accuracy. The result is that Holocaust denial and distortion reach audiences orders of magnitude larger than the pre-social media denial movement ever could.
How the platforms work
The major social media platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter), operate recommendation algorithms designed to maximise user engagement. Engagement correlates, consistently, with emotional intensity: content that provokes strong reactions, including outrage, fear, and conspiratorial excitement, spreads further and faster than content that does not. Holocaust denial content, which combines conspiratorial framing, claims of hidden truth, and hostility to established authority, performs well by engagement metrics. The platforms did not design their systems to spread denial; they designed them to maximise time-on-platform, and denial was one of the things that benefited.
The specific mechanism varies by platform. On YouTube, the recommendation system that plays videos automatically after a viewed video has been extensively documented as pushing viewers progressively toward more extreme content, including denial and antisemitism. On Facebook, Holocaust denial content was, until 2020, explicitly permitted under a policy that treated it as “opinion” rather than hate speech. Facebook changed this policy in October 2020 following pressure from Jewish organisations and public figures including former President Barack Obama, banning content that “denies or distorts the Holocaust.”
TikTok and younger audiences
TikTok has emerged as a particular concern for Holocaust educators and Jewish organisations because of its dominant position among users under the age of twenty-five. The platform’s algorithm serves content based on engagement without requiring a subscriber relationship, meaning that denial and distortion content can reach users who have no prior interest in the topic. Studies have documented the presence of denial content, antisemitic tropes, and trivialisation of the Holocaust on TikTok, including the use of humour and irony as vehicles for content that would be recognised as denial if stated directly.
The trivialisation problem is distinct from outright denial. Content that uses Holocaust imagery for comedy, that draws false equivalences between the Holocaust and unrelated events, or that decontextualises Holocaust history into dehistoricised fragments contributes to the erosion of understanding without necessarily making explicit denial claims. This content is harder to identify and moderate than direct denial statements, and its effects on younger audiences are less well understood.
The regulatory response
The European Union’s Digital Services Act, which came into force in 2024, imposes obligations on large platforms to assess and mitigate systemic risks including the spread of illegal content. Holocaust denial is a criminal offence in seventeen European Union member states, which means that denial content distributed through platforms operating in those jurisdictions is subject to legal takedown obligations. The practical enforcement of these obligations against platforms operating at global scale remains a significant challenge.
The United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act 2023 established new duties for platforms to protect users from illegal and harmful content, including content that incites hatred on grounds including religion and race. The Act’s provisions as they apply to Holocaust denial and antisemitism are still being tested in practice.
See also
- Modern Antisemitism and Historical Patterns
- Antisemitism in the UK at Record Levels
- The Next Generation of Holocaust Education
- Holocaust Education in UK Schools
- Deborah Lipstadt
Sources
- Institute for Strategic Dialogue, Holocaust Denial on Social Media, ISD, 2019
- Institute for Strategic Dialogue, TikTok and Holocaust Distortion, ISD, 2021
- Community Security Trust, Antisemitism on Social Media, CST, 2022
- Facebook, Policy Update: Removal of Holocaust Denial Content, October 2020
- European Commission, Digital Services Act, Regulation (EU) 2022/2065