History and Contrarian Expression: Debating Genocide on Reddit

Social media communities are increasingly considered as spaces where evidence-based information about history is undermined. We combine expert interviews and content analysis of debates about genocide in a popular online contrarian community to understand how to mitigate the spread of misleading information across such communities in the domain of history. We analyse 1725 entries on 10 Reddit forums dedicated to debating and promoting scepticism towards international consensus about prominent historical topics. The entries we analyse cover three topics referred to as genocide by forum members: the Holocaust, the Holodomor, and the COVID-19 vaccination. The prevailing view suggests that contrarian expression fosters smaller, ideologically homogeneous, and relatively radical online spaces where differing views are diminished or entirely absent. To the contrary, we analyse real-life behavioural data to demonstrate substantial scepticism towards contrarian narratives even in some of the most popular dedicated online communities, which may suggest that these spaces are more internally contested than prevailing theories imply.