The project is based on the observation that, in recent years, the social media platform TikTok has increasingly become a space in which far-right content and material glorifying National Socialism can circulate. Videos frequently convey antisemitic narratives or relativise the Shoah. At the same time, however, a growing field of initiatives and educational projects has emerged on TikTok that seek to provide young users with well-founded knowledge about the ideology, crimes and historical context of National Socialism.
Through ethnographic explorations on TikTok, we identified a number of such initiatives active in the German-speaking world, particularly in Austria and Germany. Broadly speaking, the field can be divided into two different types of channels, which differ primarily in terms of who operates them.
Institutional channels
These are accounts run by established institutions such as research institutes, archives, museums or memorial sites. One key initiative is the internationally oriented TikTok Holocaust Remembrance and Education Initiative, launched in 2021, which supports memorial sites and museums in using TikTok specifically for educational purposes. This initiative has given rise to projects including the TikTok channel of the Mauthausen Memorial. Alongside “mini-lessons” providing basic historical information, the channel also features formats such as interviews with contemporary witnesses and Holocaust survivors as well as digital tours of memorial sites.
“Bottom-up” channels
Alongside these institutional accounts are channels that we refer to in our research as “bottom-up channels”. Unlike institutional accounts, they are run by content creators with a personal interest in history who are not affiliated with an institution.
Such formats are considerably less common. In the course of our research, we identified only three channels that regularly publish this type of content. They include, however, the channel with the largest reach in the field, @keine.erinnerungskultur. These videos generally adopt a more explanatory approach: they provide background and contextual information on current debates surrounding National Socialism and the Shoah, address widespread myths, or tell lesser-known stories about Nazi crimes and different groups of victims.
What both types of channels have in common is their attempt to communicate historical knowledge on a platform fundamentally geared towards short, rapidly consumed videos. This is also where the central challenge lies: How can a complex and sensitive historical subject be presented in a format that often receives only a few seconds of attention?
This is the question our research addresses. We analyse relevant productions using discourse-analytical methods and conduct expert interviews in order to understand how such content can be communicated successfully under the conditions of the platform.
The results have been published as an open-access e-book by FH JOANNEUM Press and are available for free download at https://doi.org/10.60588/N5GP-4445.