Holocaust education in networked publics: audience responses to a facebook campaign against holocaust distortion

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.