Abstract: In this chapter, we investigate how four Italian and five German Holocaust memorials and museums, as well as three major internationally relevant Holocaust organizations, employed Facebook for Holocaust remembrance purposes during the period of pandemic lockdown. A comparison was made of the quantity and variety of activity on their Facebook pages during the months of April and May 2020, as compared with the same time span in 2019 and 2021. Although the study revealed major changes and adjustments in Holocaust institutions’ Facebook activities, both in terms of volume and type of content and regarding interaction strategies, the results show that the COVID-19 lockdown did not appear to trigger a radical change in Holocaust remembrance institutions’ use of social media. Despite the changes found in many Holocaust remembrance practices on Facebook and their growing use of digital media, the memorials and museums considered in this study appear to adopt a conservative stance in terms of the topics and themes addressed via social media and a general little change in the framework of commemoration policies. Also, despite a drive toward internationalization, as demonstrated by the Holocaust institutions’ increased use of English, there still appears to be a certain tension between local and global memories of the Holocaust.
Abstract: This study examines audience responses to “Proteggi I Fatti”, an Italian Facebook campaign developed within the European project Deconstruct: Deconstructing and Countering Holocaust Distortion via Campaign, Education and Training. The campaign aimed to raise awareness of Holocaust distortion and denial by disseminating historically accurate information and supporting critical engagement with online content. The analysis is based on 10,160 public comments collected from the comment sections of nine Facebook posts published between December 2024 and May 2025. Methodologically, the study combines lexical and bigram analysis, sentiment analysis, word embeddings, and LLM-assisted classification through the Gemini API, followed by manual validation. Findings show that many users reframed the campaign’s educational messages through the lens of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially the war in Gaza. Recurring patterns include Holocaust distortion, Nazi analogies, victim-perpetrator reversal, and accusations that Holocaust memory is instrumentalized for political purposes. The paper contributes to research on digital Holocaust education by showing how social media campaigns may become sites where remembrance, political conflict, antisemitism, and distortion intersect. It also highlights the value and limits of AI-assisted methods for identifying implicit and context-dependent forms of Holocaust distortion in platformed publics.
