One in five young Americans thinks the Holocaust is a myth
economist.com
economist.com
A real “be careful what you wish for” tale. When I think back to the advent of the World Wide Web, breaking the mainstream media’s hold on information distribution seemed like such a wonderful possibility.
Fast forward a few decades and here we are: corporate controlled social media networks are indiscriminately pushing absolutely anything that keeps eyeballs engaged in front of their users who treat it all as fact.
I can’t quite say I’m nostalgic for the days of mainstream media domination but it feels increasingly like we jumped from the frying pan into the fire. At least it was accountable: you might not like an article the Washington Post or the New York Times published but you’d know who wrote it and you’d know who published it. If you didn’t want to read it you could just not read the paper any more. Now we have faceless anonymous social media accounts pushing any old crap and the networks themselves holding up their hands and saying “who, me? Oh, that’s nothing to do with me!”.
Further, many of the social media sources today will work to show "real" sources versus AI generated content, etc. and that will result in some of those sources themselves just becoming centralized authorities on what is generated and what is not, though that job is more difficult.
[1] I'm explicitly using citizens here instead of "consumer" because I detest that characterization of people and refuse to use the term. We need to have higher standards.
You might not like a tweet and you can block the user or stop using twitter entirely. Yes, that might be hard, twitter might feel important, you might feel excluded if you don't keep up with it, but that's also true for mass media.
If you don't like anonymous speech, you will have to avoid certain mass media, like the Economist, and you have to choose certain social networks, like Facebook. You have choice with both social media and mass media.
The Economist not publishing author names is a minor detail in the grand scheme of things. The point is that The Economist is in full control of what it publishes and is accountable for it. If I don't like the Economist I won't read it.
> You might not like a tweet and you can block the user or stop using twitter entirely.
IMO Twitter is a bad example here. It's very easy to give up on Twitter. But people use Facebook for a huge range of things, not just for getting news. And blocking individual accounts is a constant exercise in whack-a-mole, one I engage in frequently. New accounts always pop up.
The exception might be TikTok and the reposts of TikTok on Instagram, but I have nearly zero engagement there.
Education standards in America has been falling no matter which way you look at it. That will have to reverse first.
[0]: https://mises.org/power-market/grade-inflation-harvard-and-y...
[1]: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/10/5/faculty-debate-...
We learned a lot about early Canadian settlement and relations between Europeans and First Nations. By the time I found myself in high school we only needed to take a certain amount of "social studies" credits and, while history was included in that category, there were options that were not specific to history. My experiences learning about Canadian settlement had been so dry and boring that I had made up my mind that I didn't like history at all and so I made every choice in high school to opt out of having to take history classes. In other words, WWI and WWII, if they were taught at all were "optional."
but that couldn't happen again.
We taught them a lesson in 1918,
and they've hardly bothered us since then!
'For the rest of us, perhaps. Not for the dead, not for the more than fifty million real dead in the world’s worst catastrophe: victors and vanquished, combatants and civilians, people of so many nations, men, women, and children, all cut down. For them there can be no new earthly dawn. Yet though their bones lie in the darkness of the grave, they will not have died in vain, if their remembrance can lead us from the long, long time of war to the time for peace.'
Many attempts have been made to help us remember where humanity has gone wrong. I am prone to despair to see something so well documented being treated as a myth.
I have caught myself in some similar doubts about certain current events, it was only in connecting to real human people from both sides who lost loved ones that I remembered, ah, yeah, this stuff does happen.
For some context, they polled 1500 young adults who opted in to an online research panel. They asked them more than 100 questions, about everything from antisemitism to abortion. The "Holocaust is a myth" question comes after several about whether Israel is an apartheid state, is trying to wipe out Palestinians, the Jews have too much power, etc.
It's not a simple one off question about the Holocaust, but an entire framing about Jews, Israel and Hamas.
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I question how representative the 1500 respondents really are. Which young person is going to want to spend time answering 100+ questions on a survey about Israel? How many 18 to 35s even read or care about the Economist?
The results for most of the Jewish questions in the 18 to 35 group lined up pretty neatly pro vs anti (Israel). Maybe they just got sick of answering so many similar questions. Shrug.
I wouldn't necessarily draw too strong a conclusion from a poll like this, about a topic like this, at a time like this. It seems designed to capture the most inflamed opinions (at the expense of a more silent majority).
Turns out the poll was really bad, with one of the contributions being people who essentially troll the pollsters for the lulz
Young people are spending way too much time on tiktok and hardly any at all on critical thinking.
I can be disgusted at both. I can be more disgusted at how much more terrible Israel’s destruction is AND be disgusted that Hamas attacked in the first place. And still not be pro-either-side.
The amount of death and the kind of death happening is disgusting. Period.
I think the “stupid” ones, to borrow your word, are the ones refusing to see that.
It's also clear that Israel are too cautious about civilian casualties, meaning the war doesn't just affect Hamas.
My opinion listening to Ukrainian civilians and Palestinian civilians, the difference is that at least Russians don't claim to be 'moral' or 'careful', while cheering while an empty UN school explode.
- A condemnation of Israel is not necessarily pro-Hamas
- A palestinian scarf is not necessarily pro-Hamas
- A person with a rainbow flag is not necessarily gay
- A palestinian is not necessarily pro-Hamas, or pro-hanging gay people.This is true in a meaninglessly technical way I guess, but any average well travelled american adult woudld agree that if you see a student-aged protester at a city council meeting in Berkeley with a rainbow flag, there is a really high probability that their rainbow flag attire is meant to show support for LGBT causes.
Context. Critical thinking. Use it.
> - A person with a rainbow flag is not necessarily gay
In my previous comment, I only referred to text of the immediate parent comment (your first).
Please be candid when interpreting what you read, it is a good practice!
- opposing genocide directed at a population is not an endorsement of any, much less all, policies of any government that claims to represent that people.and i guess we shouldn't advocate for saving innocent lives, because some members of the same population don't support gay rights? incidentally, how do you feel when gay people in your country protest for equal rights?
Question asked. Question answered.
There is legitimate debate around the deterioration of news organizations as accurate, trusted sources of information. But TikTok and its ilk are nothing but propaganda vectors, and not in a direction we are going to enjoy going.
The media in this case makes a point that we should know about this genocide, but I wonder what effect holding genocides in public consciousness does? Will remembering that Japanese Americans lost their California land prevent further land seizure? Will knowing about the butchering of native Americans stop their mistreatment? Did denying the Armenian genocide help Azerbaijan take over?
Will knowing about the Holocaust or believing it happened prevent Jewish hatred? All the Nazis online either deny the Holocaust or want it to happen. Knowledge doesn't help.
In one survey from 2020 of GenZ + Millennials in the US (, 63% did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. In the same survey, 11% believe Jews caused the Holocaust.
But wait, it gets even worse. Top academic institutions in the US don't have moral clarity the calling for the genocide of Jews, as we witnessed over the last couple of weeks.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/survey-finds-shocking-lac...
Roma people and other ethnicities were also targeted by the Nazis and sent to extermination camps. They have perspectives on those events as well.
The difference is that the folks who own the west agreed that those things were worth killing off, so after the war they reinstated all the folks who were in charge of fighting those things via stuff like Gladio and other anti-leftist post-war operations.
So of course they aren't going to teach that fact any more than they'd let folks teach about US chattel slavery or the genocide of indigenous folks who used to live where the US is right now.
It's well known that actual belief and poll answers do not align, but here in particular I feel like there's an impish desire to give the "wrong" answer, and that's what the poll is measuring, rather than simple misinformation.
Imagine if 93% of _all_ people used TikTok "almost constantly", and imagine if the content consisted almost entirely of misinformation causing instability at scale in alarming, obvious ways.
Does it matter whether this outcome is driven by malicious foreign actors or uncaring algorithms optimizing profits? Shouldn't it be restricted on principle?
Free speech should be protected for individuals and also groups at some scale. But why should entities with vast, nearly universal reach among the youth be permitted to delude them at scale to the detriment of our collective future? This can't be the right answer to free speech.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/12/11/teens-social...