Rise of Holocaust denial driven by pernicious, AI-driven social media

A historian and his former student warn that AI-driven social media algorithms are mainstreaming Holocaust denial and Nazi revisionism, with figures like Nick Fuentes attracting millions of followers by mocking rather than denying the Holocaust. The authors argue that traditional historical education is losing the battle against algorithmically amplified hate speech.

Rise of Holocaust denial driven by pernicious, AI-driven social media See more of our coverage in your search results. Add The New York Post on Google https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=nypost.com Originally published by The Free Press. As the algorithmic age takes Holocaust denial https://nypost.com/2022/01/20/un-adopts-israeli-resolution-to-combat-holocaust-denial/ mainstream, historians must admit a bitter defeat. When the two of us met at Harvard 15 years ago, one was a professor teaching modern history, and the other was an undergraduate interested in the future of artificial intelligence. The elder of us had published a succession of books concerned with one of the most important and intractable questions of the 19th and 20th centuries: Why did the successful economic and social integration of the Jews after their emancipation or westward emigration produce such a vitriolic backlash? I Ferguson had written a history of the Rothschild banking dynasty https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/the-rothschild-dynasty-survived-wars-and-crises-will-the-epstein-files-tear-it-apart-18735944 and a biography of Siegmund Warburg. I had studied the German hyperinflation of 1923 and its corrosive impact on the Weimar Republic. I had written books about the two world wars, one of which — “The War of the World” — offered a novel interpretation of the Holocaust as one the worst of in a series of episodes of mass murder. I not only lectured on these issues at Harvard and other universities, but I also sought to reach the widest possible audience by engaging in journalism and broadcasting, producing more than 30 hours of documentary television for PBS and Channel 4 or the BBC in Britain. My animating goal was to ensure that citizens learned the lessons of history — including the vital lesson that antisemitic rhetoric can be translated into genocidal reality if it is adopted by a modern state. Yet today I see this hatred normalized, the Holocaust trivialized. Popular and influential conservatives such as https://nypost.com/2025/11/04/media/ben-shapiro-blasts-tucker-carlson-for-normalizing-nazism-by-hosting-white-nationalist-nick-fuentes/ Tucker Carlson and the Conservative Political Action Conference crowd now tolerate traffickers in Nazi revisionism. And the poison being peddled to young conservatives by radicalizers such as Nick Fuentes is even worse https://nypost.com/2026/01/19/us-news/nick-fuentes-andrew-tate-and-other-influencers-party-to-kanye-wests-heil-hitler/ than traditional Holocaust denial. They don’t so much deny the Holocaust as mock it and celebrate it. A 27-year-old Rumble streamer who first earned far-right fame by attending the Charlottesville, Virginia., white supremacist rally https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rSmIRWPZb8 in 2017, Fuentes presents himself as a history-savvy truth-teller. In contrast to competitors crouched over webcams in Red Bull–strewn bedrooms, he projects a retro talk-show vibe — suit and tie, tasteful set, warm lighting, high-end camera. Five nights a week, his million-strong legion of followers gathers to see Fuentes spend two to three hours reacting to the news and opining on pop-culture drama before engaging directly with fans via “superchats” they pay him handsomely to read on-air. But when you ask one of them to explain Fuentes’s ideas, the answer is usually hopelessly vague. “You’ve just gotta watch for yourself,” they reply, attaching a video longer than “Lawrence of Arabia.” This is a tell — a sign that the true attraction isn’t evidence or arguments, but instead the emotions Fuentes arouses. If you watch a three-hour lecture about history or science, you can summarize the key points to a friend, even if you can’t recall every detail. By contrast, there are no summarizable takeaways from performances like a Fuentes show. He gleefully spouts the N-word and unfurls slur-laced harangues against transsexuals, gays, Muslims, Indians, blacks, Jews and women — language his white male listeners know would get them fired. Often, the offensiveness is unmoored from any ideology at all, like Fuentes’ recent declaration that child sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was “cool as fuck.” The posture is that he’s freeing his audience — especially “involuntarily celibate” incel Zoomer men — from all the norms they resent. With that pretext, Fuentes gives his viewers a fig leaf of cover to treat virulent hatred as a big joke they’re all in on. He praises Jim Crow segregation, admires Joseph Stalin, lauds the Taliban and calls for an American dictatorship. But it’s all wrapped in ironic 4chan memes and intermixed with chat about Star Wars, Taylor Swift and the “Barbie” movie. So Fuentes is only breaking one more taboo when he says: “Hitler was awesome,” “Hitler was right,” and “the Holocaust didn’t happen.” The main point isn’t to convince people of that factual claim. It’s to make them reject the topic as unworthy of moral concern altogether, and to paint those who care about Nazi atrocities https://nypost.com/2025/10/15/lifestyle/famous-ww2-nazi-identified-with-help-of-ai/ as cringey, out-of-touch scolds. Now add today’s AI https://nypost.com/2024/05/11/tech/googles-ai-refuses-to-say-how-many-jews-were-killed-by-nazis/ into the mix. Since the original Facebook news feed, the AI used by the platforms has become vastly more sophisticated. It now systematically plucks such “rage bait” videos from obscurity and pushes them to precisely the users most likely to engage — on a scale, at a speed and with a precision inconceivable 10 years ago. The app’s interface may look the same, but show interest in a Fuentes clip, and quite quickly every other video is someone ranting that Jews or blacks, or slutty women, or Democrats are ruining America. Yet the platforms reward brevity, so gradually one sees the same message conveyed by short, abstract memes that make no argument at all. In the deepest bilges of the algorithm are calls to violence, often evading the platform’s content-moderation software with a peaceful alpine landscape and spoonerized incitement: “Jill kews.” Increasingly, the creators of such content use AI-generated images to heighten the emotional impact of the message — innocuous scenes that turn into giant swastikas if you unfocus your eyes, or imaginary scenarios of angelic blond girls surrounded by brown-skinned rapists. Realistic deepfakes depict Jewish celebrities making inflammatory comments, or hordes of savages rampaging through a city. And, since 2024, AI has been used to resurrect the Führer himself. Viral videos now translate Hitler’s speeches into English using his own voice and delivery style — transforming what sounds to anglophone ears like cartoonish bombast into something far more compelling. Recently, as an experiment, we watched a few right-leaning TikToks. Six of the next 10 videos the algorithm served us were of Hitler oratory. An army of bots commentating positively creates a powerful illusion of consensus. Especially for young people, seeing a large crowd affirming such messages legitimizes them, and stirs feelings of belonging for those who join. So, what starts with AI manipulation soon draws in all-too-real Americans — not only the incels, but also their friends and family members. The results for the TikTok generation are alarming. Young Americans have become much more antisemitic than their elders, with 18% of 18- to 22-year-old voters saying the Jewish community has had a negative impact on the United States, compared with around 6% of those age 45 and older. Although both far-left and far-right radicals are much more likely to hold such views than the general population, the horseshoe is not symmetrical. Those ages 18–34 were asked whether they agreed with at least one of a series of antisemitic statements such as “Jews in the United States have too much power.” Among “extremely conservative” voters, 64% agreed with one or more, compared to just 34% of those who are “extremely liberal.” The Fuentes effect on this age bracket is clear — older, extremely conservative voters were not significantly more antisemitic than the overall electorate. The Iran war brought these sentiments to the fore. As young MAGA voters rushed online to express their disillusionment with the war — within a month of its beginning, only 49% of Republicans 18–29 were in favor, versus 84% of those over 65 — leading hate-mongers could pitch their Jews-cause-all-wars message to a massive new audience. This is already translating to offline politics. In Florida’s GOP gubernatorial primary, an endorsement from Fuentes has propelled far-right provocateur James Fishback https://nypost.com/2026/06/04/us-news/florida-governor-candidate-threatens-to-send-civilians-armed-with-ar-15s-to-end-teen-takeovers-after-weekend-shooting/ — who rails against “goyslop” ultra-processed foods supposedly marketed by Jews to poison gentiles and said a black journalist “should be lynched” — into second place, with one month to go until the primary. Even among mainstream Republicans, a sizable minority of young DC staffers identify as pro-Fuentes “Groypers,” shaping the party’s rhetoric going into the crucial midterms. Despite assurances that they take this problem seriously, the algorithmic media companies are losing control. They are simply not investing enough in the strong “immune-system” AI they would need to keep pace with the latest bots and their neo-Nazi creators. We face, in short, the gravest challenge yet to the West’s commitment to free speech: an AI-powered assault on historical truth. Of course, humans in America have a right to hold even the most odious views, and to share falsehoods peacefully with those who’ll listen. And we can still try to fight ordinary anti-history with the facts. But this is no longer the world in which Christopher Browning and Richard Evans could forensically expose the Holocaust denial distortions in David Irving’s books, ensuring that Irving lost his 2000 libel case against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books. When Holocaust denial is beamed straight into the visual cortex as eight-second selfies of a teenager poking his eye as a signal to “notice” Jewish subversion, there is nothing to debunk, and no counterargument to make. In the time it takes to say, “On the contrary, as Raul Hilberg convincingly demonstrated in his magisterial treatise . . .” a stimulation-hungry Zoomer is on to the next video. Indeed, the threat posed by the likes of Fuentes might be survivable if users were interacting only with other authentic humans. But they’re being inundated by a tsunami of AI slop and microtargeted rage bait on platforms whose algorithms reward “please stop mocking my grandmother’s murder : ” as “engagement.” No matter how loudly flesh-and-blood users shout, they are bound to be drowned out by a chorus of lifelike bots programmed to hijack the conversation. When they argued for free speech, neither John Milton, John Locke, nor John Stuart Mill could have foreseen a public sphere so polluted. As Pope Leo XIV argued in Magnifica humanitas, his landmark encyclical on AI https://nypost.com/2026/05/25/world-news/pope-leo-xiv-calls-for-robust-regulation-of-ai-in-manifesto-that-ponders-the-future-of-humanity/ , no top-down intervention can rescue us from this mess. We cannot engineer our way out of a deeply human truth: The algorithms reflect our own vices back to us — and magnify them. As long as we indulge our wrathful impulses, we’ll see more rage bait that stokes them. As long as we give in to our short attention spans, our news feeds will carpet-bomb our brains with dopamine. As long as we guzzle flattering lies, the truth will be muscled off our screens by propaganda. This is a classic collective action problem. If you eat a Big Mac, it won’t make others unhealthy. But if you watch rage bait, you not only pollute your own information intake, but also tell the algorithm to spread that content to your friends and neighbors. So, just as we stigmatize littering, smoking indoors or sneezing uncovered in a crowded elevator, we must learn to stigmatize the vices that befoul our shared digital environment. We must recover a shared sense of moral responsibility not to contribute to the conditions that let a Fuentes thrive. It’s a lesson that dates back to Cleon in ancient Athens. Ultimately, as Plato and Aristotle discovered, the only bulwark against demagogues is a people virtuous enough to resist their lure. We fervently hope Americans still can be virtuous. Philosophers, artists and spiritual leaders may yet call us back to the path of virtue. But it is up to them. In the face of an avalanche of AI-powered anti-history, the real historians are powerless. We thought we could prevail in a fair fight about what really happened in the past. We naively believed that, if we went to the right archives, and read the right documents, and summarized them with the right footnotes, and published our scholarly books and peer-reviewed articles, then the Holocaust deniers would be driven from the field. What fools we were.