TikTok Commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day

Guest post by Elizabeth Kanter, Director, Government Relations TikTok and Eric Ebenstein, Director, Public Policy TikTok

Communities around the world today mark Holocaust Remembrance Day by commemorating the victims of the Holocaust and the liberation of the Nazi concentration and death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945. The day calls on each of us to reflect on the Holocaust and other genocides, and to educate ourselves to help prevent future atrocities.

Education is one of the most powerful ways to counter hate. So to mark this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, building on the work we did in the United Kingdom last year, we are partnering with the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and UNESCO to provide our global community with easy access to educational resources all year round so they can learn more about the Holocaust, the Jewish community and antisemitism.

Helping our community access authoritative information on the Holocaust

Starting today, if people search for a term related to the Holocaust – such as ‘Holocaust victims’ or ‘Holocaust survivor’ – they will see a banner at the top of the search results page that prompts them to visit aboutholocaust.org to learn more. For community members who search for terms related to the Holocaust that violate our Community Guidelines, we’ll continue to block search results and additionally display this banner to direct them to the WJC and UNESCO educational resources.

We will also add a permanent public service announcement directing our community to the aboutholocaust.org website to a collection of hashtags. These hashtags are currently widely used by our community to share educational content related to the Holocaust and Jewish people, including #HolocaustSurvivor and #HolocaustRemembrance.

In the coming months we will introduce a permanent banner at the bottom of videos discussing the Holocaust which redirects people to aboutholocaust.org. The banner will be displayed when a community member posts a video with hashtags related to the Holocaust in the video description. This will give our community another easy access point for authoritative information, for example in the event that they come across Holocaust-related content on their For You feed.

“The World Jewish Congress is proud to partner with UNESCO and TikTok in making factual and reliable information about the Holocaust available to the TikTok community. TikTok allows us to reach a new audience, some of whom may be uninformed about the horrors of the Holocaust and therefore be potentially susceptible to misinformation. We welcome the platform taking responsibility and leveraging its reach to stop the spread of antisemitism and Holocaust denial.” – Ronald S. Lauder, President, World Jewish Congress

“Denying, distorting or trivializing the true facts of the Holocaust is a pernicious form of contemporary antisemitism. We welcome TikTok’s commitment to act with UNESCO and the WJC. All online platforms must take responsibility for the spread of hate speech by promoting reliable sources of information.”  – Audrey Azoulay, Director-General, UNESCO

“We believe education plays a critical role in striking out hate, which is why we’re proud to partner with the World Jewish Congress and UNESCO to help people learn about the Holocaust and understand their role in fighting modern-day antisemitism. Hateful behaviour is incompatible with TikTok’s inclusive environment, and we’ll continue to put our full strength behind keeping our platform a place that is free of hate, while harnessing the power of TikTok to educate our community.” – Elizabeth Kanter, Director, Government Relations, UK, Ireland, Netherlands & Israel.

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