Auschwitz Memorial excoriates Elon Musk’s X for failing to act on Holocaust denial
Full statement from Auschwitz Memorial in response to Holocaust denial post flagged by BBC reporter
A spokesperson from the Auschwitz Memorial responded to my inquiry last week about a Holocaust denial post on X flagged by BBC reporter Shayan Sardarizadeh.
I posted a segment of the Auschwitz Memorial’s statement on X. Their full statement is here:
“Holocaust denial is a mendacious conspiracy theory. Although it is factually similar to flat Earth claims, it is, in fact, a dangerous and hideous carrier of antisemitism and hatred. And Holocaust denial hurts people. Deniers hate. And this is the only thing they do. They harass and insult the memory of the victims. Holocaust deniers do not care about the facts, and they do not care about the victims.
The Auschwitz Memorial preserves the historical site of two parts of the German Nazi camp: Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau. All authentic remains: documents, ruins, buildings, and objects, as well as all authentic words of survivors that we collect, are the evidence of the crimes that took place there. Being able to experience being at the site of the former camp has a transforming power.
We do not encounter Holocaust denial at the historical site. Yet, every day we meet Holocaust denial content on social media. We react as quickly as possible — we delete or hide such comments if we can, and we also block and report accounts that spread denial.
As a rule, we do not discuss with deniers, but every day we post facts, names, documents, and stories that explain the history of Auschwitz. Social media is not the only online area we are active in. We produce accessible online lessons and podcasts to allow people to access the truth. Soon we will also publish a lesson about the danger of Holocaust denial that will also explain strategies of distortion used by deniers.
We believe that all social media should recognize Holocaust denial as an abusive and harmful expression of hatred directed against Jewish people. By allowing deniers to spread their hatred, social media companies become co-responsible. In recent years, we could see improvement on some platforms, while on others, Holocaust denial has been more visible recently.
No matter what the ethical choices of people who run social media platforms and create their algorithms and content, our fundamental role has been, is, and will remain: we must oppose all lies, misinterpretations, distortions, or instrumentalizations of the tragedy and memory of the victims of Auschwitz.
We do not have any agreement with X. The only thing we can do on X is to report denial posts — as every other user. We do this whenever we encounter denial. In recent months we have noticed many cases when reporting a Holocaust denial post does not give results. ‘Violent event denial’ is officially forbidden on the platform. This only demonstrates that the moderation system does not work properly. In the post in question, we also reported it and we did not even get a confirmation that they ‘received our case’ and will ‘investigate’. The question remains — is it a sign of a broken system, or something much more dangerous and worrying — protection of hate speech?”
