The subdivided but shared platform exposes our group of moderators to a daily barrage of sexism, racism, white supremacy, and Holocaust denial. It shares a social media host, Reddit, with a number of communities that have become notorious for their toxicity, such as the Pizzagate conspiracy theorists, the misogynists of the Red Pill, and the pro-Trump trolls of The_Donald. Readers ask questions about historical subjects ranging from ancient history to the modern day, and people with proven expertise in that particular subject-working historians-answer them with in-depth and comprehensive answers supported by scholarly sources.ĪskHistorians is unique in another way. Because Holocaust deniers want and need a platform to reach this goal, it is imperative to deny it to them, as an institution, a newspaper, or a social media forum.ĪskHistorians is unique among public-history outreach projects. Any attempt to make Nazism palatable again is a call for violence. Taken together or separately, these beliefs serve one goal: to make the ideas of the Nazis socially acceptable.Ĭlarifying, as Zuckerberg later did, that Facebook would remove posts for “advocating violence” will never be effective for a simple reason. By convincing people that they might have a point or two, they open the door for further radicalization in pursuit of their ultimate goal: to rehabilitate Nazism as an ideology in public discourse by distancing it from the key elements that make it so rightfully reviled-the genocide against Jews, Roma, Sinti, and others. Deniers need a public forum to spread their lies and to sow doubt among readers not well-informed about history. And it is why AskHistorians, where I am one of the volunteer moderators, takes a strict stance on Holocaust denial: We ban it immediately. This is why engaging deniers in such an effort means having already lost. Conversation is impossible if one side refuses to acknowledge the basic premise that facts are facts.
This position fundamentally fails to grasp how Holocaust deniers spread anti-Semitic propaganda, underscoring a flaw in how the purportedly neutral platform thinks it ought to handle particularly odious ideas. Zuckerberg got into hot water on Wednesday when he stated that Facebook wouldn’t necessarily remove Holocaust deniers from its platform because people “get things wrong” and because it’s not always possible to understand the deniers’ intent.
That is a core principle of moderating the AskHistorians subreddit, one of the largest history forums on the internet-and a crucial lesson Mark Zuckerberg seemingly does not understand. There can be no debate with Holocaust deniers.
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