National Holocaust Centre & Museum
Operation Denial
BRIEF
76 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, a third of the world deny or minimise the Holocaust and shockingly it’s the new generations who are spreading these views. The Holocaust Centre and Museum asked us for help to tackle an issue that went well beyond the educational programs they had in place. Despite all their efforts to raise awareness about what really happened 76 years ago in schools and universities, they couldn’t compete with the influence social media has amongst young people.
STRATEGY
We needed to make the new generations understand the reality of the Holocaust, its relevance in today’s world and how to help prevent something like this happening again. We found that young people were less likely to hold anti-semitic views but more likely to deny the Holocaust as they were heavily influenced by the toxic conversation happening on social media. We realised that denial was spreading in the same way as fake news. Infecting influential communities on Reddit before spreading into mainstream social media and news. Censoring fake news or banning those who were spreading them was just making the problem bigger. Instead of fighting the trolls we decided to copy their system, replacing their lies and half-truths with real Holocaust stories from the very people who survived it.