TikTok is the social-media platform on which Holocaust denial and distortion are currently most visible to the under-25 demographic in the English-speaking world. The platform’s combination of short-form video, algorithmic feed, and youth-skewed user base has made it a significant vector for denier content since approximately 2019. The platform’s content-moderation policies have evolved during that period; the underlying problem of denier reach to younger audiences has not been solved.
The platform and its moderation history
TikTok was launched internationally in August 2018 as the rebranded successor to the Chinese-domestic short-video platform Douyin, owned by ByteDance. The international platform reached one billion monthly active users by 2021. The user base in the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union skews younger than other major social-media platforms; approximately one-third of users are aged between 13 and 24.
The platform’s first dedicated Holocaust-denial moderation policy was published in October 2020, in response to a Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany report (the Claims Conference’s “TikTok Report”) that had documented widespread denier content on the platform. The policy stated that Holocaust denial would be removed under the platform’s Community Guidelines on hateful behaviour. Enforcement was patchy. A follow-up Claims Conference report in January 2022 found that denier and distortion content remained widely accessible.
The platform’s policies have continued to evolve. As of 2024, TikTok’s published Community Guidelines explicitly prohibit “denying, distorting, or trivialising the Holocaust” alongside other forms of hateful conduct. Enforcement is conducted by a combination of automated content-moderation systems and human reviewers; the underlying volume of content uploaded daily means that no moderation system catches everything.
The forms of denier content on the platform
The denier content on TikTok takes a small number of recognisable forms.
The first is direct denial: short videos in which a creator states denier claims as if they were established fact. The figures cited tend to be drawn from the standard denier repertoire: that the six million figure is exaggerated, that the gas chambers did not function as described, that survivor testimony is unreliable. The videos are often short (under 30 seconds), often presented with the affect of “just asking questions”, often accompanied by trending audio that has nothing to do with the content but maximises the algorithmic reach.
The second is comparative distortion: short videos in which the Holocaust is compared, usually unfavourably, to a contemporary political event. The most common contemporary comparison since 2023 has been to the Israeli military operation in Gaza. Comparative distortion typically does not deny the Holocaust; it minimises it by presenting the contemporary event as comparable.
The third is dismissive humour: short videos in which the Holocaust is the subject of jokes, typically delivered with the affect of edgy comedy. The category includes cosplay videos in which creators dress as Anne Frank, as Holocaust victims, or as SS personnel, often as part of trends that pass through the platform every few months.
The fourth is impersonation of victims and survivors: videos in which creators speak in the voice of a fictional Holocaust victim, often using AI-generated imagery, often making statements that the actual historical victim would not have made. The videos are sometimes intended sincerely (as imagined memorial content) and sometimes intended satirically; the distinction is not always clear from the content alone.
The Claims Conference research
The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (the Claims Conference) commissioned and published two studies on Holocaust knowledge among American adults under 40, in 2020 and 2023. Both studies found significant gaps. The 2020 study found that 63% of American adults under 40 did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered, that 36% believed the figure was 2 million or fewer, and that 11% believed Jews had caused the Holocaust. The 2023 study found that the figures had not significantly improved.
The Claims Conference’s specifically TikTok-focused work has been published in a series of reports between 2020 and 2024. The reports document specific videos, specific accounts, and specific recurring claims, with content-moderation requests submitted to TikTok where the platform’s policies have been violated. The Claims Conference’s “We Remember” hashtag, launched on TikTok in January 2022 in advance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, was the principal counter-content campaign.
The platform-design problem
The TikTok problem is not specifically a TikTok problem. The platform’s algorithmic content-recommendation system is more aggressive than those of older platforms, but the underlying issue is the broader one that affects all social-media platforms: that user-generated short-form content, distributed without editorial gatekeeping to a demographic with limited prior knowledge of the historical record, will include a non-trivial proportion of denier and distortionist content. The content-moderation systems can only ever catch a fraction of the volume.
The harder problem is that the algorithmic recommendation systems amplify content that produces engagement, and that denier content (because it is novel, transgressive, and emotionally charged) tends to produce engagement. The platform’s commercial incentives are not aligned with the suppression of such content; they are aligned with the maximisation of engagement, which the content provides.
The educational response
The educational response to TikTok denial has been led by the major Holocaust memorial institutions, particularly the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the Anne Frank House, all of which now operate active TikTok accounts producing short-form educational content for the platform’s audience. The Auschwitz Memorial’s account, launched in 2020, had over one million followers by 2024. The content tends to be short, factual, and visually direct: a single document, a single artefact, a single survivor’s photograph, with a brief explanatory caption.
The educational response has measurable effects on the audiences it reaches. It does not reach the audiences that the denier content reaches; the algorithmic feed segregates the two populations to a substantial degree. The state of the question, as of 2026, is that denier content remains accessible on the platform, that the major Holocaust memorial institutions are producing serious counter-content, and that the audiences for the two are not the same.
See also
- Anne Frank
- The Six Million Figure is an Exaggeration
- 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
- Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, TikTok and Holocaust Denial Report, 2021 and subsequent updates
- TikTok, “Community Guidelines: Hateful Behavior”, https://www.tiktok.com/community-guidelines
- UNESCO and the United Nations, History Under Attack: Holocaust Denial and Distortion on Social Media, 2022, https://www.unesco.org
- Anti-Defamation League Center for Technology and Society, Online Antisemitism Reports, annual editions, https://www.adl.org
- Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, official TikTok account @auschwitzmemorial, accessed 2026
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, official TikTok account @usholocaustmuseum, accessed 2026
- Yad Vashem, official TikTok account @yadvashem, accessed 2026
- Anne Frank House, official TikTok account @annefrankhouse_official, accessed 2026
- Adam Hadley and Jonas Kaiser, “TikTok and the Future of Holocaust Memory”, in Holocaust Studies, vol. 28, 2022
- USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Holocaust Denial in Social Media”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org