I'm glad you're telling your story. The moderation in this subreddit is absolutely top notch. It's actually why I joined Reddit in the first place, this sub. It's unlike anywhere else on the modern web, purely due to the diligence of the mods and the passion of the contributors.

AskHistorians is a special place and I'm glad that's never changed in my 6+ years of reading it.

I'm not sure how relevant that this is, but I'm a mod on /r/Judaism, and we also don't bother debating Holocaust deniers. We just ban them on the spot.

As far as we're concerned, it's not a substantive argument, just a false veneer of rigor intended to give antisemitism the look of legitimacy.

EDIT: I keep seeing messages pop up from the app, which, when I go here, have been deleted. I can't read the messages, but I'm assuming that they're antisemitic garbage which either the mod team, or an algorithm of theirs, is deleting. Either way: good job; keep it up!

Clarifying, as Zuckerberg later did, that Facebook would remove posts for “advocating violence” will never be effective for a simple reason. Any attempt to make Nazism palatable again is a call for violence.

What's more, removing only the pro-nazi posts which are explicit calls to violence assists them on making Nazism more palatable. That is effectively acting as editors, removing content that might repel an otherwise susceptible reader.

6 years you guys have been kickin and tossin and cleaning up comment responses, and i've never thanked you. Thanks for building a fantastic public space. Love coming here.

A well-crafted statement. Well done!

Sometimes its dissapointing checking out a topic you're interested in but then seeing that its just all deleted comments but i prefer having no information than bad information. Cheers to the moderators for doing such good work.

Awaking from my slumber to say great job on this article. And thanks again to /u/eternalkerri and /u/NMW for convincing me that an "anything goes" moderation policy was not a good plan in the early days.

We remove content that is racist, sexist, or anti-Semitic in nature and ban the offending users from commenting in our forum on a daily basis.

I'm seeing a lot of people saying this stance is against free speech, and I'm honestly baffled.This is a moderated community. Communities have a right to have their own rules, and enforce them however they please. It's not like the mods from r/AskHistorians are doxxing people they disagree with or they're encouraging anybody to violently repress somebody's opinion if they differ from theirs.

Free speech means you can say whatever you want, and the government can't do anything about it. It doesn't mean you get to spread misinformation and harmful propaganda and won't be called out on it, *especially in a public forum.*

Not to mention the policies of this subreddit seem to work perfectly fine, considering the quality of the discussions you can have here.

Thank you, that was a really great article, and did a fantastic job of putting into words some of the conclusions about this kind of rhetoric I've come to recently. I hope more places choose to moderate themselves this way.

Thanks very much to all the moderators on this subreddit; those who put up with so much, for so long, for so little recognition.

I was glad to see the caveat defining revisionist history. The term is often used as a shorthand for a baseless or politically-motivated theory but the process of examining, re-examining, and problematizing the historical narrative is a bedrock principle of the field.

Fantastic article. The AskHistorians mods are by far the best mods on this site for quality content (HQGifs mods might be a close second).

I agree 100% with the stance taken in this subreddit. The internet has fundamentally failed when it comes to addressing stuff like this. I think this approach will help stop these ideas from spreading but how do we engage the people who already have gone to the dark side? Facebook and reddit aren't the place for that, but surely we should try to do something? Anyone know of any successes engaging directly?

YouTube is another website I wish would take a page from this sub. So much pro-Nazi propaganda on there it's ridiculous. It honestly might be worse than Facebook

I saw the twitter thread from one of the mods here, and it was really great seeing the professionalism in this sub shown to a wider audience.

Wait, people actually don't think the Holocaust happened? How? Did...did WW2 not happen to/for them or what?

I have the utmost regard for the job you guys do here.

As a mod of /r/changemyview (another heavily moderated sub), it's interesting to see the similarities and differences.

While, like you, we have a zero-tolerance policy toward hostility and rudeness directed at other users, we do allow the discussion of lots of frankly horrible opinions. We can't change someone's racist opinion if we can't discuss it.

Even holocaust denial is potentially fair game, as long as the OP appears to be posting in good faith.

[I'm not saying that I think you should, especially since there's no really valid historical question to ask that starts from that assumption.]

Of course, like you guys, we get accused of bias from both sides, which is ironic. If we remove a post denying the holocaust where every top level post presents an argument for how we know the holocaust actually happened, which side are we biased in favor of?

Anyway, congrats on the well-deserved attention!

Once when I submitted a question it was denied. The mod who responded to me indicated why it was denied and then gave an explanation which touched upon my initial post and answered the question I had submitted. I have long since forgotten the question, I have not forgotten how I was treated and how a mod, on a heavily moderated sub, took their own time to answer me themselves.

Keep it up.

Sometimes in relation to current events, I see questions come through AskHistorians that are ... leading questions. To obfuscate, let's say that Borogravia is meddling with the Clacks Towers in Uberwald, and that's in the news. I have seen questions pop up during some times like "How were the perpetrators of the Zlobenian Genocide against Borogravian Treacle Mines dealt with after the War of the Year of the Sideways Leech?" or "How was it received when it was discovered that Ankh-Morpork was Using Zlobenian Money to buy Land for Clacks Towers in Borogravia?"

For things like that, is there any way to detect and prevent brigading of "whataboutism" posts, when current events make bad PR for someone who has the capability to do "social media shaping"?

It popped up on my facebook. I immediately shared.

It does a great job at explaining how extremists use "just asking questions" to legitimize nazi-ism.

This policy makes perfect sense for this subreddit, but saying that Facebook as a whole should have the same policy doesn't make any sense. Facebook isn't as narrow of a community as one history-focused subreddit.

I've said it to people before and Facebook is just a reactive company they won't do anything till it blows up in their faces unlike you guys on this sub who are 100% proactive and I thank you for that.

Well written!

You really nailed it with the part that it is easy to make a short false statement but hard to fully explain why it is and correct it with facts (paraphrasing here).

I always eventually feel a sense of 'mental fatigue' and later on frustration when trying to accommodate similar situations IRL .

When the internet was young I had always thought Holocaust denying was a joke, I later found out that they weren't joking and then I became shocked. I have always loved how intense y'all are about keeping the posts clean and to the point. And NOW I am even more thankful that y'all keep all that awfulness off of here. "When You Do Things Right, People Won’t Be Sure You’ve Done Anything at All." Thank you for being such a solid Rock in these troubling times.

As the child of a Holocaust survivor, thank you for taking a hard line against this dangerous nonsense.

The Holocaust denial policy on this sub is perfectly reasonable.

But when it comes to the general goal (not giving the platform for spreading and legitimizing harmful conspiracy theories), it should be pointed out that this sub has it somewhat easier by also enforcing the "No current events" (20-years) rule. This time is usually enough for some form of historical consensus to emerge with regards to a particular event, political figure or ideology. Thus truthful and false interpretations become rather well-defined and easily distinguishable, which makes policy enforcement much easier.

I wonder how would you have done it without the 20-year rule. E.g. would you allow Sandy Hook deniers, MH17 truthers, or Assad apologists?

Because Facebook cannot impose a 20-year rule and would need guidelines for current events as well.

Even typing this i feel as if i shouldn't be making a top level comment. which is great evidence of how well the mods have consistently enforced the rules over the years.

Other subreddits come and go but i feel this one will be around for a long time to come.

thanks for the great work!

Coming from /r/all. Can somebody briefly explain how /r/AskHistorians moderates?

I'm reading here all the time, usually not responding. Just having fun reading.
On a personal note - I'm a jew and it's heartwarming to see, thank you.

Conversation is impossible if one side refuses to acknowledge the basic premise that facts are facts.

These are words to live by. I just thought of a couple people in my life.

I think this is a good policy. I'd also want to remove similar bullshit like "was the moon landing real, historically?"

But have we ever done a thread about the history of Holocaust denial itself?

No one would have been stupid enough to dare not believe the Holocaust happened until at least like... Well really, the last few years. Only now that the witnesses to it have recently passed.

If I might ask, and if it isn't too meta, would you, professional historians, favor having laws against holocaust denial in the US like one can find in Europe?

For me it seems a valuable discussion. The amount of holocaust denial I see from primarily Americans is astounding. Especially that a lot of regular folks will often defend these deniers because of free speech, as if any restriction on free speech automatically leads to complete censorship.

The only people that I know that deny or question the holocaust, are doing so in bad faith and, IMO, just abuse free speech to conduct thinly veiled hate speech.

Denying the Holocaust is to historians what "not believing" in evolution is to biologists. Come to think of it, beliving in a flat earth to astronomers and physicists... Why do we have such a problem of ignorance in such an information packed and knowledge driven modern world? Have we always been like this?

So, how do we fight this on subs which don't have such a strict moderation policy? And on subs where we're not the moderators, and where the moderators have chosen to give a voice to Holocaust denial? A month or so ago I had this exchange in a Star Trek meme subreddit, and I was taken aback by the brazenness of it. What do you say to these people, who claim that if they didn't give a voice to Holocaust denial, they would be suppressing a valid minority viewpoint? I don't feel it is a viewpoint worth defending, but I'm not sure how to communicate that in this kind of situation without being dismissed as a 'snowflake' who is offended by everything.

I was at F8 (Facebook's annual conference) this spring in a professional capacity, and Zuck spent a few minutes discussing Facebook's responsibilities with respect to "fake news" and several other Facebook reps spent at least an hour on the topic in the room I was in. By the end of the conference, I was ready to slap him.

The particular that bothered me the most was Facebook's new stated policy about untrue content. They talked about how they were working with fact-checking organizations like Politifact and Snopes to identify news content that was verifiably untrue. Then they talked about how they were using Facebook's algorithm to de-emphasize such content from identified bad-faith publishers. For instance, a Sandy Hook denialist article posted or shared might get flagged and be 80% less likely to show up on another user's feed. But if we've got the capability to identify this as a bad-faith and dangerous argument, why should it appear on anyone's news feed? Why should the corporate Facebook page for the bad-faith content creator not be banned or removed? They've gone through all this trouble to painstakingly identify abusive content, and then not remove it. What's the point of that?

This sub is a shining beacon of hope in a dark and confusing world. Thank you.

This was a really good read. It shows the counterintuitive relationship between moderation and free speech.

The average person hearing that certain voices are being “censored” would tend to advocate for free speech. They don’t have the subtle context of years of moderating a forum like this gives.

Really great explanation.

In this endeavor, deniers focus on many minor and obscure details and leave out crucial context. It takes them little effort to formulate a wrong assertion, but it takes historians a long time and a lot of words to refute one. Our early attempts to engage on these points have shown that length and nuance do not play well on the internet and do not interest the deniers. The point of JAQing off is not to debate facts. It’s to have an audience hear denialist lies in the first place. Allowing their talking points to stand in public helps sow the seeds of doubt, even if only to one person in 10,000.

This section in particular reminded me of this episode of the video series The Alt-Right Playbook. The whole series is well worth a watch, I think, if you're going to consider engaging in political debates, both online and out in the real world. It's really helped me step back and reconsider / change the way I interact with some of these political types by getting a better understanding of the big picture and how these kinds of things play out in the long haul.

One of the key ideas coming out of the series, at least to me, is that ultimately some of the best things you can do to defeat these kinds of toxic ideas are to just don't engage and don't give them a platform. The approach AskHistorians mod team is taking here is definitely on the right track, I think; kudos! :)

Bravo. As a frequent lurker here, I really appreciate the work your team puts in. Let me join those in giving thanks for makimg this one of the best subs on reddit!

I shared this article and I would like to encourage others to do so. It clearly makes a point that needs making.

This sub has the most iron clad moderation team, and I really appreciate it <3

^please ^dont ^remove ^my ^comment

TIL about JAQing off. I had no idea this was even a thing. Feigning ignorance to open up the door to Holocaust denial and sowing the seeds of doubt is truly insidious

Does anyone know of studies done about how ideas like holocaust denial spread online and how they're influenced by being banned or being debated with? Are there ever circumstances where engaging with them is useful in order to expose falsehood?

I was made aware people were saying things about me.

I approve of these things.

I know this is sorta against AskHistorians in general - I'm not a professional historian nor do I have any academic sources at hand - but thank you for taking the time to write such a well thought out article. I could not agree with your point more and think that is a critical problem we are facing on most media platforms.

It reminds me of a moment in The Royal Tenenbaums where Owen Wilson is pitching a book and his premise is "we all know General Custer died at the battle of Little Big Horn. What my book proposes is... maybe he didnt?"

Now that was supposed to be comedy, but CNN/Fox News/The internet are seemingly willing to give that kind of factually wrong viewpoint a platform. "Kelly, our next guest doesnt think Little Big Horn happened, let's hear what he has to say."

The media is giving a free pass to racists, anti-semites, nativists, etc because they want to make it look like there needs to be a debate. I disagree, these people should be viewed with contempt for the evil and violence they are promoting. "I never promoted violence!" says the white supremacist - as if the history of slavery they speak so fondly of was bereft of horrible atrocities against the slaves. These people are being given a platform on television! It's horrible and needs to stop.

I agree in principle with the concept of deplatformng certain narrow lines of argumentation. I have serious concerns about the actual humans that actually run Facebook being able to implement such a policy in a way that will not slide into direct manipulation of public perception to influence the populace.

There are many more examples of topics about which one can have a legitimate good faith debate than there are topics like Holocaust denialism. I don’t trust Facebook to be able to reliably differentiate between them.

thank you for all that you do

Just commenting to show my support. In my opinion, strongly moderated forums are the best kind of forum, and this subreddit is perhaps the best example of that.

Secondly, the article is absolutely correct. Giving these people a platform is not acceptable.

Excellent work mods. I really love this sub and it’s only because you all take such a hard line to bs like this.

This sub is a great exposure to the work of historians and what they do, while providing some really compelling reading. Bravo!

Excellent article.

Fantastic. AskHistorians really is the gold standard for web forums. I wish more websites would recognize that their supposed "neutrality" is dangerous.

I don't know how I've gone this long without ever hearing "JAQing off" before, but I'm glad I have now.

I've got a couple questions here-

To be clear, I'm on the side of the mods in this- the holocaust ranks as one of the worst atrocities, and the people who deny aren't looking to argue- their minds have already been made up.

However, I get the sense that the writer would have groups like facebook emulate their behavior. While a good ideal to strive for, do you believe that this is actually viable for such a large platform?

Thank you all so much for this!

I’m happy for the reminder (running across this post on /all) to subscribe to your amazing sub on my new account. I appreciate the mods’ work in safeguarding a truly great forum for reliable question-and-answer discussions regarding history.

The same thing applies to subjects like climate change and evolution. Always beware the side that wants to "teach the controversy" on an accepted topic.

Thank you for also acknowledging other genocides like the Armenian and Native Americans, everyone knows about the atrocities of WWII (or should) but it's not the first or last time genocides have occurred. If we wish to move forward to a brighter future we must acknowledge our past, and not ignore or deny it.

Mods, thanks for doing what you do. It’s greatly appreciated.

I used to get into battles with people editing Wikipedia with that kind of nonsense. They’re pretty diligent over there too but I imagine you see a much large swath of deniers than they do. Must be difficult.

Thanks again.

Oh, so this is the reason I've blocked r/history and kept this one

I lurk here a lot and don't post at all (As it should be since I'm not qualified in any relevant fields), So this may be my only chance to say this: Thank you for this wonderful sub.

I just want to share that I found this subreddit after encountering a racist blogpost. In short, the writer claim that "African has no civilization" and that's why "African country is poor" because they "Couldn't maintain a civilization". I'm just happy to found a satisfying rebuttal in here.

Thank you so much for the work you do! I was raised by a holocaust denier who is rabidly antisemitic and bigoted in other ways. Our high school history class didn't have much time to cover the holocaust and I never learned more about it in a classroom environment. (Our teacher tried, but the class was big and unruly.) I'm not a historian, so I'm not always sure where to look for more information on everything I missed. This sub is wonderful for learning more and hearing about books, etc. to dig further.

And for anyone asking, I've argued with my father over and over about it while even showing sources cited. He doesn't care. There's no convincing some people. The best we can do is save our energy to educate people who actually want to learn.

I 100% agree that Reddit is not the place to discuss whether the Holocaust occured. Your point about how it is easy to toss a couple words together to sow doubt but refuting these claims takes a lot of effort is great. I agree that the average Redditor doesn't have the time or patience to read a lengthy rebuttal.

My question is, do you think there is any forum or venue where Holocaust deniers points should be openly debated and refuted? If so, what is that place?

Thanks for the great article. After reading it I do have a new opinion on the limits of free speech on Reddit and other internet forums and sites.

Really good to see Reddit getting positive media coverage as well.

You guys do a great job. Stern, but fair.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, SO MUCH for this article! So. On. Point. Found myself screaming out loud, "Yes!" several times while reading.

Sorry, I'll calm down. But thank you, and STAY VIGILANT, on this and related matters. Cheers! :)

I absolutely approve of this article, the ideas behind it, and the moderation in this subreddit.

Thank you for what you do, and keep up the good work, cause this is one of my favourite subreddits.

I wish more moderators were as good as you guys.

So everyone speaks about how heavy-handed AskHistorians is in this thread.

But I'm going the other way. Why was the Civility Clause not also extended to other types of historical revisionism?

For example, if someone were to ask about the Six Day War, and they somehow insinuated that one of the participants of that war started it (somehow) when current academic consensus is something else, would that be a bannable offense?

Or is the Civility Clause only applicable to denying historical events outright? e.g., if I refused to believe that the Cold War was a war at all, or if the Earth is only 6000 years old so anything previous to that did not happen.

EDIT: I also wanna add that it's obvious why Facebook doesn't just ban hateful messages. That just encourages a competing service to pop up, much like how Reddit's policies led to a bunch of people going to Voat. In such a competing service, they get to enjoy no challenge to their views at all, and a bunch of non-hate-message users will also migrate to pick a fight with the hate-message users.

I hope this article becomes a fixture in future history classes reading about our time. It says a lot about how social media works today, the problems it faces, and especially contemporary efforts of right-wing radicals to infiltrate and appropriate forums of discourse.

I can't even begin to tell you how much I appreciate that you do this.

I seriously. You are one of the very few reasons reddit can be a useful place.

Great article / statement.

I will use it whenever someone again claims that there is no free speach in Germany because Holocaust Denial is banned.

Great job on this article. It is extremely disheartening and demoralizing to see blatant white supremacist propaganda taking over so many online spaces (much of reddit included), and to have admins, and in may cases, moderators alike trying to play the "live and let live" game with nazis, fundamentally misunderstanding how these people operate, spread their views, and draw people in to radicalize them.

I'm definitely bookmarking this article, as I predict it's going to be something to link again and again to well meaning but otherwise apathetic or laissez-faire moderators of various online communities I frequent. That it comes from a mod of one of the most successful and consistently high-quality subs on reddit really adds that much more oomph in this particular application.

That Deborah Lipstadt quote is great. I've been having conversations with my cousin about a certain popular thinker at the moment. He believes that given this person a platform will allow them to eventually be proven wrong. And to an extent I think he's right: the more this specific individual has a chance to show some of their ignorance on certain topics and their lapses in logic, the less appealing he will seem to those who pick up on it.

But the issue is that this is a person who already has a following and will still attract people who are ignorant in all the same ways. And going into the nuances of how they read a specific author wrong will not really be able to pick up on why this figure is just not good.

It, of course, doesn't make the issue any easier to deal with. It's also true, I think, that open debate can bring some people back from these views. But I think the wider point of the article, that these grassroots propagandists are simply looking to cast a wide net, is vital here to understand why such rules in a place like this do exist. A strength of a sub like this is that you can expect to see well-researched answers. The catch is well-written and well-researched answers take to put up. It's easier to spam questions which will take words-upon-words to debunk thoroughly.

And there's a suspicion of wordy answers among many, I think. They seem overly defensive or not sincere to a lot of people. Which already puts people wanting to craft informative answers at a disadvantage to audiences that are being swayed in the opposite direction.

That was a brilliant and insightful piece. I also love how you cite sources even in an opinion piece. Thank you for all you do, mods!

I love this sub and I love this article for acknowledging what so few people and companies want to acknowledge. You can be calling for violence and hate even without explicitly saying so. I work as an online moderator as a career and I see it all the time. An account posts some supposedly harmless meme or something associated with hate, racism, or trolling... And if you don't remove it they will invariably escalate into worse and worse behavior until they get banned. (or the platform just let's them run rampant as long as they don't specifically say to attack people... This is Twitters strategy, and it clearly doesn't work.)

These silicon valley companies need to step up and take responsibility for their huge, global platforms. They simply NEED more trained human review and intervention. Their flawed bots are clearly not up to the job they've been tasked with.

It takes them little effort to formulate a wrong assertion, but it takes historians a long time and a lot of words to refute one.

Brandolini's Law (bullshit asymmetry principle) in effect.

Your stance and content is much appreciated.

The fact us people like zuckaberg at least think they're isolated from the results of their actions.

History says he's wrong but it's those of us who don't have power that suffer first.

Thank you for all that you do.

Great article. Well written. I can sense the anger and frustration building up with each paragraph. But you made the point explicitly clear and it’s good for me to read as it gave me insight into the potential problem of allowing just a little. Especially on this kind of platform. Just a little can slip far and wide. Excellent job. Thank you.

Well deserved, best subreddit and one of the highest quality domains on the entire internet.

I am so glad that a community I participate in on occasion is featured positively in the news -- usually reddit is, uh, not known for doing good things. I only wish I could have more time to research and answer more questions! You guys usually beat me to it and do such amazing work!

I generally agree with the points made in the article. What I'd like to know is a mod's thoughts about the people on the boundaries: people with good intentions who might be put off by the somewhat jarring experience of reading this sub for the first time. Not people who are "JAQing off" or anything - just readers who aren't used to seeing a strict process for the establishment of truth play out on a public forum.

Is there any effort being made to encourage these people to stick around? I hate to think that people are floating off to facebook because they aren't used to rigor the way the mods are. Teaching people to escape the clutches of internet nonsense seems like a valid goal for a forum promoting high quality historical outreach.

I'd also like to join the chorus of people saying thanks - regardless of the details, we're moving in the right direction thanks to mods and quality contributors.

The thing I've always found interesting about holocaust denial is the inconsistency

On the one hand, they want to restore the ideology of the Nazis while on the other hand they deny one of the central aspects of Nazism.

How applicable could this approach be to other forms of denialism? Topics like climate change denial are tied heavily into political discourse; while others like anti-vaccination can involve the recipient of propaganda actively searching for alternatives to explain personal tragedy.

I'm curious has to how this could be implemented without appearing political or driving away those most susceptible to propaganda.

love y'all. Good job.

I completely agree with this stance and denying a platform to those who would try to peddle an argument without facts. Here is my question in this era of Trump extremism, how do you deal with these same types of arguments / discussions in your non-internet life? I have taken a very similar sort of stance with my brother in law who is a vehement Trump supporter.

This is easily the best mod team on reddit . I wish you guys could everything in here.

I just subscribed because of this article. I am glad to see that there are those still fighting Nazis.

Thank you for taking this stand. I only hope Zuck and others will heed your example but I am sadly not optimistic having seen their reactions to racism on their platforms, to the point where I sometimes legit think Zuck and Jack from Twitter might be white supremacists.

AskHistorians is such a great scholastic read. A lot of people are making their appreciations known here, and since it other wise stands out of place I'd like to add that I also appreciate the diligence here.

Proud to be an occasional contributer to this community.

Well done guys, you make us all proud to be apart of this community

I doubt anyone will read this comment, but I'm wondering about something related to the Holocaust/WW2.

Why don't we include the millions of (Soviet) POWs killed in the Holocaust numbers? It was the same racially motivated killing. Ignoring it makes it look as if we deem it to be less wrong to kill previously armed but then defenseless fighting age males. Not so different from killing civilians.

Great job in the article! The moderation on this sub is top notch and you all do a great job.

I do have one question - how do you distinguish between people who use the 'just asking questions' denial strategy from people who are genuinely asking questions or have been previously misinformed? Do you purely look at the context of the statement, or perform further research into post history, or simply provide a blanket ban? There may be a missed opportunity for education.

The Slate comments section was surprisingly civil. Not great, but by internet comment norms, pretty good.
One interesting comment was someone noting that maybe "we" should straighten out Reddit before fixing Facebook.
Poor reasoning, but not a completely bad point.

The medievalists and classicists among us have by now become familiar with the arguments of David Irving and Fred Leuchter.

I didn't get this part. Can someone explain me this?

Hello people from /r/All, /r/Popular, /r/Stormfront, and also non-redditors lured by the Slate article!

Please be aware that, as is discussed in the article, our moderation policies here are very strict. While we do tend to relax them somewhat for [META] threads, few quick housecleaning notes are in order.

We are happy to discuss this piece, and even debate some of the finer points on which people disagree, or else it wouldn't have been posted:

• But, the basic rules still apply here. If you can't say it nicely, then don't say it at all. We will remove uncivil comments no matter what position they take. If you see something like that, please don't respond. Hit the report button and a mod will handle it, we prefer that you don't help things escalate. Rude and disingenuous posting will have consequences.

• Also, please read the piece before you comment. If you can't take the time to read it before you decide to disagree, why should we take the time to respond to you? If you raise a point which is addressed in the article and you don't at least reference the fact you disagree with how it is dealt with there, you probably won't get a response, and might simply get removed as clutter.

• On a similar note, do give a quick scan through the the comments before you do your own. Your question might already have been addressed, so we thank you for not making us write the same response a half-dozen times.

• Oh, and this goes without saying, but if you actually are gonna argue the Holocaust didn't happen, it saves us time if you just write at the top "Please ban me, thanks" so we don't need to bother reading the rest of your bullshit.

Cheers,

the Mods

Thank you for all the work you and the other moderators do to keep this subreddit a beacon of integrity on a website notorious for toxicity.

Loved the article, very enlightening approach, such methods should be applied to the fake news phenomenon and the proliferation of other bad ideas on social media.

I think this is the first r/AskHistorians thread that I'll be allowed to comment on. This subreddit has a really dedicated balance between moderation and quality contributors. Kudos on the notoriety!

I appreciate the standards of this subreddit, and maybe Facebook should ban Holocaust deniers in particular, but it would be absurd to expect Facebook to try to uphold the standards of r/AskHistorians in general.

An excellent article that represents this sub so well. Keep up the good work!

How did this come about? Which side reached out to the other?

I've skimmed through around half of the comments and I don't think this question has been asked.

What about questioning Holocaust figures? (ie death toll). Will that result in an instant-ban?

After reading this article and then going through the comments, my mind immediately drifted to the comment sections of most media outlets. It happens rarely, but when I do decide to start sifting through the bottom of an online news article, you see some pretty horrendous examples of calls for violence, holocaust denial, conspiracy, etc. You even see this on large name media outlets sometimes.

My initial reaction is to think that the moderating policy on this sub would be very appropriate for those platforms as well. But I'm not sure if that would fall in line with what most media outlets wish to accomplish with those comment sections.

AskHistorians is easily the best thing Reddit has ever offered its viewership.

Keep up the excellent work mod team and contributors.

I don’t often comment, but I’d like to say that this article is beautifully written, and provides a fantastic argument for the way mods here act.

Congratulations on acting this way, and so clearly explaining why.

I have one question from the article.

The number of Jews killed by the Nazis was far lower than 6 million.

I always thought that 6 million also included many gays, romani, communists and other dissidents? Is that wrong then?

The 6 million has those others subtracted from that?

I'd like to ask the moderators of this subreddit a question regarding the political implications of their stance. My question is meant in good faith. And a meta-post on this topic, made by individuals who have obviously thought about this issue a great deal, seems to be the ideal forum to discuss it.

My concern is about the true value of denying people a platform.

I've been reading the same news that you have for the last 6 years. I saw Charlottesville, I saw names like Richard Spencer become recognizable, I saw all the things that make people justifiably concerned about the state of US democracy. But when I think about these issues I find myself concluding that de-platforming cannot be the answer.

I'd like to invite you to consider the perspective of someone who wants to discuss a "sensitive" topic in US politics. Rather than use a specific example, think about what that person will encounter when the topic they want to discuss has been de-platformed. They want to talk about something they feel is important and deserving of discussion, but what they find is that places like Reddit won't allow certain types of discussion. What does this person do? Do they give up their search and conclude the topic was never as important as they thought? Of course not, instead they keep looking to find a community where their questions will be answered. And inevitably, particularly when it comes to an issue like Holocaust denial, they discover that the only place offering any kind of conversation is a place like Stormfront.

I won't take my example too much farther because I think I've illustrated my point enough to appropriately contextualize my underlying concern. If respectable, legitimate communities refuse to discuss a topic of interest, people who want to discuss it will not simply give up and instead will gravitate towards the only places who do discuss it. And since those places are almost invariably extreme in nature, the practice of de-platforming on legitimate websites indirectly exposes more people, not less, to extreme ideas.

This is the conclusion I've reached when I consider this issue on places like Facebook and Reddit. Clearly the moderators of /r/AskHistorians have considered this topic carefully, how do you respond to this line of thinking?

Great job guys!

Do you guys have a collection of links or responses on here that deal with debunking holocaust denial arguments?

Fantastic article!

Is there a post someone already did asking about the Holocaust?

This is really great and I think the policies you implement here are spot on. (AskHistorians is one of the things that actually got me to come to reddit in the first place.) That said, I take objection to one comment in the article:

> Clarifying, as Zuckerberg later did, that Facebook would remove posts for “advocating violence” will never be effective for a simple reason. Any attempt to make Nazism palatable again is a call for violence. More than 11 million victims prove that.

This is of course true. But the reality is that calls for violence are pretty much inherent to advocating for any and all political ideologies. It's most obvious when people are advocating for wars. But more generally, when someone argues for any policy that is enforced by the threat of the police knocking down your door and dragging you to jail, they are calling for violence. And yet, when I reported someone to Facebook for posting in support of drone strikes during the Obama era, they told me to stuff it.

I think we should acknowledge that opposition to Nazism is not just an implementation of a general opposition to calls for violence. It's an opposition to Nazis, because of things specific to Nazism and Nazis which make them particularly bad: the unique horror of the Holocaust.

Edit: just reread my comment and realized I wasn't clear: I 100% believe in the holocaust, because it's a factual and horrifying event.

So, I have a question inspired by the section of the article on JAQing off - what is the evidence of the Holocaust? I'm genuinely asking, out of curiosity. I've met deniers before and realized I don't actually have a nuts and bolts answer.

I've read Night, I've seen pictures of skeletal humans from the camps, and I've read a testimony or two from soldiers (most of the last two being from my high school textbook and a visit to the holocaust museum in Houston). But I have to assume there is more than that.

Basically what I'm asking is what form does evidence of the holocaust take? Surely there are hundreds/thousands of examples.

I think your article misses the point that Facebook is a platform, while you are a group on a platform. If reddit banned the_donald or red_pill or any of the subreddits you mentioned, there would be a compromise on their mission. I think Facebook should introduce crowdsourced moderation (i personally believe in a flair or credibility rating for any news article shared), I would be uncomfortable with them fundamentally limiting speech, even if it's anti-factual and a pre-cursor to anti semitism/racism. The main reason being it just reinforces the idea of conspiracists that information is limited in a top down fashion meant to silence them, and they'll only become more isolated in their views.

Holocaust denial is a practice pushed by far-right activists and revisionists to push anti-Semitism, fascism and other objectively detestable things.

The other extreme, radical left-wing activists, like to deny the massacres of communist governments, such as Pol Pot, Stalin or Mao, to promote an agenda.

How does the moderation team deal with this and what actions are taken against such things?

I don't think the comparison between a subreddit and Facebook as a whole is fair nor makes much sense.

Reddit.com doesn't moderate against holocaust denial just as Facebook.com doesn't. And there's lots of Facebook groups that moderates against holocaust denial in the same way as /r/AskHistorians.

The individual then has about the same tools available to them for moderating the content they take want on both portals.

The article is also structured weirdly/biased in my opinion. Ex:

AskHistorians is unique in another way. It shares a social media host, Reddit, with a number of communities that have become notorious for their toxicity, such as the Pizzagate conspiracy theorists, the misogynists of the Red Pill, and the pro-Trump trolls of The_Donald.

So Reddit is above scrutiny as a social media host but Facebook isn't? Or are they implying Facebook isn't a social media host, wich would be straight up false?

They only mention Facebook as a ''single-minded''/homogeneous (sorry i can't come up with better words) entity. So it is really hard to make out what the article actually wants Facebook to do concretely.

From one perspective one can read the article as a think-peice on what platforms on the internet as a whole should strive towards. But from another perspective it can be read almost as a ''hit-piece'' against Facebook, while ''boosting'' Reddit.

So yea, i am having a tough time understanding the intent/agenda of this article.

Please bear in mind that english is not my first language so i could be reading the article up upp-the-wall cookoo wrong. And i heavily moderate both portals for my personal use, so i could be ignorant of something.

Willl you do the same for other genocides like the Armenian and Cambodian genocide?

I've read the article and a few debates in the comments and I'm going to try a reasoned stance of moderate disagreement:

It could be beneficial to have a place where these ideas could be openly shot down. As the article and some mod comments more or less get across, this policy isn't supposed to help stupid Nazis stop being stupid Nazis, it's to help observers who might not be able to easily distinguish at a glance between a "nice-looking" or rhetorically powerful argument (of the deniers) and an argument that uses facts and evidence (to prove the occurrence of the Holocaust).

But observers aren't ONLY coming here. They're going all over the Internet where this mod team isn't on hand to lock it down. They could end up being convinced by these Nazi pseudo-arguments if there ends up being complete polarization where websites only allow one side or the other. Here's hoping that the grand majority of websites would ban Holocaust denial; but there's still a little left and it makes for good clickbait, so if people go to both places they won't ever see the counterargument.

Whereas, if (maybe only a few) Holocaust deniers could have their ideas publicly executed on a large and visible forum like this one, said observers could 1) not be Holocaust deniers 2) learn a thing or two about constructing an argument.

Now, you could argue--or just declare--that this is not the place for it. But the mission of this subreddit is more-or-less to provide an avenue for the spread of historical knowledge and a place for debate to learn more about the past. If you disallow historical revisionism entirely, you also remove the opportunity for observers to learn about why it's bad and what, exactly, the crackpots are attempting to revise.

And of course there's always the epistemological rabbit hole of quid est veritas? Taken individually and out of context, it can be relatively easy to bring doubt on a single piece of evidence. If you take away your own space as historians to gather together the historical context for the public and prove the occurrence of the Holocaust without a shadow of a doubt, then you leave that power in the hands of revisionists.

The Holocaust is the obvious proof that the ideology of National Socialism is, at its core, racist, anti-Semitic, and genocidal.

While the Holocaust obviously occurred, I don't think it is a necessary component of proof that the NAZI party was, at its core, racist and anti-Semitic. I mean, they proudly proclaimed that.

That's what I don't understand about Holocaust deniers: What do they think they'll accomplish? The NAZI worldview is still unacceptably fucked up with or without factoring in the Holocaust.

A question for any of the moderators here but specifically I'd like u/commiespaceinvader or u/georgy_k_zhukov to answer. So your justification for banning any kind of pro-Nazi rehtoric or holocaust denial raises some questions. This will start off making me appear as a Nazi sympathizer or something along those lines but please read it all before reacting.

You have a very strict policy against neo-nazism and the like. Do you have a similar policy for radical left-wing rhetoric? If so, why is it not as public as your anti-nazi rules? Can you give some examples of the moderation team handling radical left-wing rhetoric such as denial/revisionism of for example Mao or Stalin's policies? I mean, your specific reasoning for banning holocaust denial is that

"By convincing people that they might have a point or two, they open the door for further radicalization in pursuit of their ultimate goal: to rehabilitate Nazism as an ideology in public discourse by distancing it from the key elements that make it so rightfully reviled—the genocide against Jews, Roma, Sinti, and others."

This same reasoning could justify the banning of all kinds of ideas, the one I want to focus on is Marxism and the 100% real mass murder of innocents that occured because similar to Nazism, populations were convinced through propaganda that a certain minority was evil and needed to be murdered.

I've spent a lot of time talking to and observing radicalism, both on the left and the right. Both of them exist, and they absolutely manifest wherever they have the opportunity to. But one of the things I've observed is that radical left-wingers tend to be much more subversive about how they propagate. Is this the reason why it appears that you have a bias in favor of radical-left ideas?

AskHistorians is in the wrong on this. While it’s clear holocaust deniers aren’t engaging in good faith, and have the worst intentions, removing these posts proscribes ordinary people from easily encountering learned and well-researched counter-arguments

I am a HUGE advocate for free speech. And I will entertain people with offencive opinions because I would like to understand where they come from.

But free speech isn't about demagoguery and it's not anti-truth.

As a libertarian, the old saying applies: your right to swing your fist stops at my nose.

As Dan Rather is attributed with: You are entitled to your own opinions, but you're not entitled to your own facts.

Free speech isn't the end. It's the means to an end: public discourse.

You don't have a right to free speech that removes the right of free speech from others, especially if it fundamentally invalidates the factual, objective truth of both history and personal experiences.

Which brings up a point here: anecdotal experiences DO MATTER because they are the individual truths of the history of each person. I think we lose sight of that here.

I never questioned the authenticity of Holocaust, read the whole article and at least the first half of top comments. So hopefully I've earned the right to disagree.

Allowing their talking points to stand in public helps sow the seeds of doubt, even if only to one person in 10,000.

I don't believe protecting those one in a ten thousand kind of stupid guy from Nazi ideology should be a moderator's job. Let them believe what they want, as long as the ratio isn't changing, they will never be anything but something to laugh at. They really are not the problem.

But you playing guardian, "protecting stupid child from naughty idea" attitude is a problem. It's giving ammunition to those people.

They are designed to call often minor details into question and to create doubt among readers less familiar with the history

Imagine what happens when that stupid/"less familiar with the history" guy stumbles upon a "minor detail" later under a "No media will ever cover this" kind of post. Your original arguments and facts could've prevented them from instantly falling for this BS, even if they didn't entirely read it. But now complete absence of discussion will simply help those deniers agenda.

My philosophy is you can't fight ideas, bad or good, by trying to stop their circulation, but only with arguments and facts. I understand why this might be hard for mods of such a popular sub, and I won't ask you to allow "Jews taking over the world" kind of blatant, stupid, racist post. But if you ever need to spend a second to figure out if a post is racist in disguise or genuinely curious guy, I'd plead you to not remove it.

I’m normally an absolutist on general free speech (both legal and social) but I get the point. This subreddit is more or less a public platform, and subscribers don’t want holocaust deniers here just like I don’t want them giving talks at my university, organized by the administration.

However, I think we shouldn’t ban deniers from talking on public property out in the open (TMP restrictions may apply), for a number of reasons, but stemming from the fact that it’s not a platform that lends endorsement.

I’m not here to argue that specific point directly, but rather just consider what counts as a platform that lends endorsement. I think that this subreddit applies due to its highly engaged readership, the viral nature of Reddit, and the organized moderation. The article centers around criticizing Zuckerberg for not banning deniers, but I don’t see Facebook in general (not talking about organized Facebook groups) as a platform that lends endorsement based on my criteria

I hope it’s clear, but I’m not a denier. I’m just wary of the social implications of outright banning deniers in open public spaces

I have zero interest in polemic partisan historians, will be unsubbing now after years on here. This sub has never had a problem with biased answers but never realized until now it was officially one sided by policy.

I would prefer to have all ideas in the open where the lousy and historically inaccurate ideas can be destroyed publicly for all to see. To me that is a more effective approach than censorship. I don't want to hide evil, I wish to confront it and defeat it.