The internet did not create Holocaust denial, but it transformed it. Before the internet, denier content was distributed through small specialist publishers, mailed pamphlets, and conference networks. The audience was self-selecting and limited. Online distribution removed the gatekeepers, lowered the cost of distribution to zero, made denier content findable through search and recommendation algorithms, and brought it to audiences who had not been looking for it. Each of the major social-media platforms has had to develop its own content-moderation policy on Holocaust denial. The policies have evolved over time. The underlying problem of denier reach has not been solved.
The pre-platform internet, 1995 to 2007
The early internet served the denier movement well. Ernst Zundel’s Samisdat website was online from 1996. The Institute for Historical Review’s website was online by 1997. The Codoh (Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust) site, founded by Bradley Smith in 1995, became the principal online clearing-house for English-language denier content. The Vrij Historisch Onderzoek site in the Netherlands, the Aaargh site in France, and a network of smaller sites in Germany, Sweden, Australia and Canada provided national-language coverage.
The pre-platform period was, in effect, the deniers reproducing online the publishing infrastructure they had built offline. The audience was still largely self-selecting. The criminal-law instruments many European countries had used against denier publications (the Loi Gayssot in France, section 130 of the German Strafgesetzbuch) became progressively harder to enforce against websites hosted outside the relevant national jurisdiction. By the early 2000s, much of the major English-language denier output was hosted on US servers and was therefore protected by the First Amendment from any criminal action that any other jurisdiction might bring.
The platform era, 2007 onwards
The shift from self-published websites to platform-hosted content (Facebook from 2004, YouTube from 2005, Twitter from 2006) changed the audience for denier content. The audience was no longer self-selecting. Algorithmic recommendation systems put denier content in front of users who had not sought it out. The effect was particularly pronounced on YouTube during the 2010s, where the recommendation algorithm developed a documented tendency to push viewers from mainstream historical content towards more extreme content over the course of a viewing session.
The major platforms initially had no specific policy on Holocaust denial. The content was treated as ordinary speech subject to ordinary moderation rules, which generally meant it was permitted unless it crossed into direct incitement or harassment. The position changed in stages.
Facebook (now Meta) banned Holocaust denial in October 2020, after sustained pressure from advocacy organisations and following the Christchurch shooting in March 2019, which had been live-streamed on the platform. Mark Zuckerberg, who had previously defended the position that the platform should not remove denier content, reversed his position in a public statement. The ban applied across Facebook and Instagram.
YouTube banned Holocaust denial as part of a broader content-policy revision in June 2019. The policy categorised denier content as “supremacist” content and removed it under the platform’s hate-speech rules.
Twitter (now X) had no specific policy on Holocaust denial through the 2010s. The platform’s content moderation was substantially scaled back after the Elon Musk acquisition in October 2022, and denier accounts that had been banned under the previous moderation regime were reinstated. The platform’s current public position is that Holocaust denial may be reduced in algorithmic distribution but is not removed unless it crosses into direct incitement.
TikTok introduced an explicit denier-content policy in October 2020, which has been progressively enforced and refined since.
Reddit’s policy is administered through its sub-community structure. Several denier subreddits were banned during the 2018 to 2020 platform-wide policy revisions; the platform’s hate-speech policy now explicitly prohibits Holocaust denial.
Telegram has no published policy against Holocaust denial. The platform’s content-moderation philosophy is minimal-intervention, and denier channels operate openly.
The audience problem
The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany has commissioned a series of surveys on Holocaust knowledge among adults under 40 in the United States and other Western countries. The surveys consistently find significant knowledge gaps, with the 2020 American survey finding that 63% of adults under 40 did not know that 6 million Jews had been murdered, that 36% believed the figure was 2 million or fewer, and that 11% believed Jews had caused the Holocaust. The 2023 survey found similar figures. Knowledge of specific camps is poor; knowledge of the basic timeline is poor; knowledge of the specifically Jewish dimension of the killing is poor.
The audience problem matters for the platform problem because audiences with limited prior knowledge are more vulnerable to denier and distortionist content. A user who does not know that approximately one million people were killed at Auschwitz cannot evaluate a video that claims the figure was two thousand. A user who has never seen a survivor account in full cannot evaluate the claim that survivor testimony is “all the same”.
The educational response
The major Holocaust memorial institutions have built substantial social-media presences over the last decade. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem, the Anne Frank House, the Imperial War Museum and the Wiener Library all operate active accounts on the major platforms. The Auschwitz Memorial Twitter / X account, with over a million followers, posts daily death-day commemorations of named individual victims; the cumulative effect is to render the population of victims as a population of named individuals rather than as a statistical abstraction.
The educational content is serious, factual, and reaches the audience that follows it. It does not reach the audience that follows the denier content. The algorithmic feeds keep the two populations substantially separate.
The legal response
The European Union’s Digital Services Act (Regulation 2022/2065), which came into full effect in February 2024, imposes due-diligence obligations on the major platforms in relation to illegal content under the law of any EU member state. Holocaust denial is illegal under the law of most EU member states. The DSA mechanism allows regulators in those member states to require the platforms to remove specifically identified content. Enforcement is in early stages.
The German Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG, in force since January 2018) requires platforms operating in Germany to remove illegal content within tight time limits. The Act has been used in several Holocaust-denial cases. Whether the requirements survive the DSA is a matter of ongoing legal interpretation.
The state of the question
Holocaust denial on social media is, on the available evidence, a problem that the platforms have addressed unevenly, that the criminal law cannot solve in jurisdictions with First Amendment-style speech protections, and that the audience-knowledge problem makes resistant to purely platform-side solutions. The educational response is necessary but cannot reach the audiences that denier content reaches. The state of the question is one of active management of an unsolved problem.
See also
- Ernst Zundel
- Anne Frank
- Yad Vashem Jerusalem
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Anne Frank House Amsterdam
- Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
Sources
- Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, U.S. Millennial Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Survey, 2020 and 2023, https://www.claimscon.org
- UNESCO and the United Nations, History Under Attack: Holocaust Denial and Distortion on Social Media, 2022
- Anti-Defamation League Center for Technology and Society, Online Antisemitism Reports, annual editions, https://www.adl.org
- European Union, Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of 19 October 2022 on a Single Market for Digital Services (Digital Services Act)
- Federal Republic of Germany, Network Enforcement Act (Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, NetzDG), 1 September 2017, in force from 1 January 2018
- Meta, “Holocaust Denial Banned from Facebook and Instagram”, company statement, 12 October 2020
- YouTube, “Our Ongoing Work to Tackle Hate”, 5 June 2019
- Mark Zuckerberg, public statement on Holocaust denial policy reversal, 12 October 2020
- Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture, MIT Press, 2015
- Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner, You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape, MIT Press, 2021
- USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org