Unesco and the World Jewish Congress (WJC) have entered into a partnership with the social networking site TikTok to combat online negationism. They announced this on Thursday, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Users who show an interest in the topic on the TikTok platform will now see a banner at the top of search results, directing them to www.aboutholocaust.org.
“If users search for Holocaust-related terms that don’t comply with TikTok’s terms of use, the platform will block the search results and show the same banner instead,” UNESCO said.
The WJC and UNESCO website www.aboutholocaust.org contains educational information in nineteen different languages about the Holocaust, the systematic persecution of the Jews and genocide by the Nazis and their allies during World War II.
Some 17 percent of the posts that appear on TikTok on the topic currently misrepresent information or deny the Holocaust.
Audrey Azoulay, the director-general of UNESCO, is therefore pleased that TikTok is participating in this campaign. “Denying, distorting, or trivializing the facts about the Holocaust is a pernicious form of modern anti-Semitism,” she says.
“TikTok is known for reaching out to young people. Unfortunately, most of them are unaware of the horrors of the Holocaust and are particularly vulnerable to disinformation,” said WJC President Ronald S. Lauder.
Last year, UNESCO and WJC entered into a similar partnership with Facebook. Since then, the aboutholocaust.org website has been viewed more than 400,000 times by users from more than 100 countries.