CyberWell's 2025 International Holocaust Remembrance Day Report Highlights Importance of Clear Platform Policies

January 23, 2025

CYBERWELL’S 2025 IHRD REPORT HIGHLIGHTS IMPORTANCE OF CLEAR PLATFORM POLICIES

(TEL AVIV — January 23, 2025) — In its annual report ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day (IHRD), CyberWell, an innovative tech nonprofit focused on monitoring and combatting the spread of Holocaust denial and distortion and antisemitism online, has found that Meta (Facebook and Instagram) removed content denying the Holocaust at rate of 78.84 percent, X (formerly Twitter) removed 68 percent of Holocaust denial posts, TikTok removed posts at a rate of 92.31 percent and YouTube removed 30.77 percent of posts denying the Holocaust. 

Despite updates announced in early 2025 to its trust and safety processes, Meta continues to consider Holocaust denial as prohibited content. 

The report, which studied posts throughout 2024, reveals significant improvements in the removal of Holocaust denial and distortion online, though the overall volume of such content continues to rise, posing an ongoing threat to Jewish communities and global security. Furthermore, the organization cautions that everyday social media users may experience lower removal rates on their favorite applications when reporting Holocaust hate speech, as CyberWell escalates violative content through its special Trusted Partner channels directly to content moderation teams. 

In 2024, CyberWell analyzed 326 antisemitic posts that violated the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, examples 4 and 5, related to Holocaust denial and distortion. CyberWell publishes reports annually ahead of IHRD and their data consistently shows a 3 percent annual increase in Holocaust-related hate speech. Some of this can be attributed to the surge of antisemitic content following Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7 which sparked a wave of antisemitic rhetoric online with a particular spike in the phrase “Hitler was right” along with narratives supporting genocide of the Jewish people. 

CyberWell uses AI technology to monitor for posts in English and Arabic that are consistent with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. Each post is then individually vetted by the nonprofit’s analysts and submitted to social media platform moderators alongside the relevant community guidelines and hate speech policies the individual post violates (sometimes referred to as “Trust and Safety”). Simultaneously, the vetted post is published to CyberWell’s open database of antisemitic social media posts, available at app.cyberwell.org. This platform is meant to drive user-led reporting and anyone with a social media account can participate in reporting prohibited Jew-hatred directly to platforms.

CyberWell further found that Meta and X have closed some of the disparity in how they moderate violative posts in English and Arabic, the languages that CyberWell monitors. Previous CyberWell reports indicated wide gaps between how the platforms moderated the same content in Arabic versus English, whereas in 2024 Meta moderated posts denying or distorting the Holocaust at a rate of 70 percent in English-language posts and 79 percent in Arabic-language posts. Similarly, X (formerly Twitter) removed 68 percent of Holocaust denial posts in English and 73 percent in Arabic.

“The progress made in removing Holocaust-related content from our favorite social media apps is encouraging, but without sustained efforts and more precise policy updates, we risk continuing to see algorithmically reinforced hate and violence perpetuated online,” said CyberWell Founder and Executive Director Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor. “2025 could very well see the rise of more dangerous rhetoric if these platforms do not recognize and act on the threats posed by denial and distortion of violent events in real-time.”

Holocaust denial content has earned higher removal rates in comparison to content denying or distorting other violent events, such as the October 7 attack in 2023 or the attack against Jews and Israelis in Amsterdam in November 2024. 

“One reason we are seeing such significant improvement in how social media platforms moderate Holocaust denial and distortion posts is their specific and clear policies against it, whereas, though most platforms maintain a policy against denial of documented violent events in general, the statutes themselves are written in a broad fashion that is less frequently enforced, particularly during emergent crises,” she added. “We urge our partner platforms to expand their policies against denial of violent events, recognizing the growing threat posed by online antisemitism and its connection to real-world harm.”

CyberWell is an independent, international, tech-rooted nonprofit combatting the spread of antisemitism online. Its AI-technologies monitor social media in English and Arabic for posts that promulgate antisemitism, Holocaust denial and promote violence against Jews. Its analysts review and report this content to platform moderators while indexing all verified posts in the first-ever open database of antisemitic social media posts – democratically cataloging it for transparency. Through partnerships, education and real-time alerts, CyberWell is holding social media platforms and their moderators accountable, promoting proactive steps against online Jew-hate. For more information, visit: https://cyberwell.org/.