5 ms·

One in five young Americans thinks the Holocaust is a myth

58 points by 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

syntaxers 3y ago
https://archive.is/pnMP7 https://archive.is/pnMP7
AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
[dead]
CapitalistCartr 3y ago
More than one in five young Americans doesn't know when WWI & WWII were, what countries were on which side, why they started, or what's imortant about them. But these kids will get better, same as we did. This headline isn't good, but I wouldn't take it too badly.
- gottorf 3y ago
  > But these kids will get better, same as we did. Education standards in America has been falling no matter which way you look at it. That will have to reverse first.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
    The article states that the trend spans education levels.
    - gottorf 3y ago
      Education levels != education standards. Consider that GPAs have been going up over time[0], so much so that nearly 80% of all grades at Harvard in recent years were As and A-s. [0]: https://mises.org/power-market/grade-inflation-harvard-and-yale-80-students-get https://mises.org/power-market/grade-inflation-harvard-and-y... [1]: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/10/5/faculty-debate-grade-inflation-compression/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/10/5/faculty-debate-...
- grok25 3y ago
  [dead]
- yalue 3y ago
  The issue is that the "young" demographic mentioned in the article is ages 18-29, and high school must have changed quite a bit in recent years if students have not actually heard about the holocaust or WWII.
  - JeffSnazz 3y ago
    We'd have to compare against a similar poll from decades ago to figure out if this true—it could be it used to be that 40% of kids didn't believe in it.
  - sybercecurity 3y ago
    Well, in my (Gen-X) high school history classes, we only got to WWI (and just after like the 1920's - 30's). I always thought that there is this weird assumption that things that happened in the teachers' lifetime or just previous are "already known" or that the culture will just implant that knowledge somehow.
    - gspencley 3y ago
      Same here (also Gen-X). Here in Canada I never learned about WWII in school. I barely remember learning about WWI, and that was usually just around Remembrance Day (celebrated on the anniversary of the Versailles Treaty). We learned a lot about early Canadian settlement and relations between Europeans and First Nations. By the time I found myself in high school we only needed to take a certain amount of "social studies" credits and, while history was included in that category, there were options that were not specific to history. My experiences learning about Canadian settlement had been so dry and boring that I had made up my mind that I didn't like history at all and so I made every choice in high school to opt out of having to take history classes. In other words, WWI and WWII, if they were taught at all were "optional."
      - verdverm 3y ago
        If you'd like to learn about WW2, I cannot over recommend this YT channel. Fantastic quality and production. https://youtube.com/@WorldWarTwo https://youtube.com/@WorldWarTwo
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  Once all the Germans were warlike, and mean but that couldn't happen again. We taught them a lesson in 1918, and they've hardly bothered us since then!
- thelastgallon 3y ago
  If they don't know, the answer would be don't know, but not making up their mind that its a myth.
- varelse 3y ago
  [dead]
ipsin 3y ago
My brain immediately translated the headline into "One in five young Americans is a trollish little asshole." It's well known that actual belief and poll answers do not align, but here in particular I feel like there's an impish desire to give the "wrong" answer, and that's what the poll is measuring, rather than simple misinformation.
- grok25 3y ago
  [dead]
- _ea1k 3y ago
  You make a good point. And 20% is only slightly high for such a result.
j-bos 3y ago
A lot of these stories feel like symptoms of a breakdown in trust. Authorities, institutions, and media of types have been caught lying; so from individual perspective with limited context, never been to the camps, never watched the trials, never met a survivor, there's not much to hang a belief on. I have caught myself in some similar doubts about certain current events, it was only in connecting to real human people from both sides who lost loved ones that I remembered, ah, yeah, this stuff does happen.
mrits 3y ago
There is a difference in what you answer on a poll and what you believe. The most obvious answer is when you are asked a controversial political question and even though you don't agree with it your political party does so answer it according to what is in your best interest and not what you actually believe.
- grok25 3y ago
  [dead]
- webstrand 3y ago
  The Economist is right-wing, it's just a measure of their reader demographics which would tend to appreciate holocaust conspiracy theories.
  - asow92 3y ago
    The Economist is center-right. Those theories have nothing to do with the rational center. Only the uneducated, far-right, and far-left are espousing that kind of nonsense today.
- verdverm 3y ago
  Yup, there was another poll that spurred bad reporting, with regards to the US and acceptability of using violence against people with different political beliefs, had it in the range of 30% for both sides iirc Turns out the poll was really bad, with one of the contributions being people who essentially troll the pollsters for the lulz
afavour 3y ago
> According to a 2022 survey from the Pew Research Centre, Americans under 30 are about as likely to trust information on social media as they are to trust national news organisations. A real “be careful what you wish for” tale. When I think back to the advent of the World Wide Web, breaking the mainstream media’s hold on information distribution seemed like such a wonderful possibility. Fast forward a few decades and here we are: corporate controlled social media networks are indiscriminately pushing absolutely anything that keeps eyeballs engaged in front of their users who treat it all as fact. I can’t quite say I’m nostalgic for the days of mainstream media domination but it feels increasingly like we jumped from the frying pan into the fire. At least it was accountable: you might not like an article the Washington Post or the New York Times published but you’d know who wrote it and you’d know who published it. If you didn’t want to read it you could just not read the paper any more. Now we have faceless anonymous social media accounts pushing any old crap and the networks themselves holding up their hands and saying “who, me? Oh, that’s nothing to do with me!”.
- ericmay 3y ago
  With the proliferation of AI content creation tools as the catalyst, we're going to go from a natural decentralization cycle to a natural centralization cycle which will be bringing trust back to sources like WSJ and NBC nightly news. Obviously you still have to keep your guard up but that was never and will never be not true. Further, many of the social media sources today will work to show "real" sources versus AI generated content, etc. and that will result in some of those sources themselves just becoming centralized authorities on what is generated and what is not, though that job is more difficult.
  - pgsandstrom 3y ago
    I guess you mean to say that we will go back to centralization since nothing decentralized can be trusted, with how easy it will become to fake facts. But that's assuming that the consumer primarily cares about truth. If that was the case, we would not be here to begin with.
    - 3y ago
jeffbee 3y ago
Recently I've met some intensely stupid kids in the city of Berkeley who keep showing up at city council hearings to shout and bang drums and demand that the city pass a pro-Hamas resolution condemning Israel. It's jarring because half these fools are somehow mixing the Palestinian scarf and rainbow flags, unaware, apparently, that Hamas would throw them off the tops of buildings for the crime of being gay. Young people are spending way too much time on tiktok and hardly any at all on critical thinking.
- Chris2048 3y ago
  Is "pro-Hamas" how they describe their actions, or how you describe them?
  - jeffbee 3y ago
    A person who demands a cease-fire in an asymmetric war in which Hamas did the first strike is pro-Hamas.
    - xahrepap 3y ago
      That’s absolutely false. I can be disgusted at both. I can be more disgusted at how much more terrible Israel’s destruction is AND be disgusted that Hamas attacked in the first place. And still not be pro-either-side. The amount of death and the kind of death happening is disgusting. Period. I think the “stupid” ones, to borrow your word, are the ones refusing to see that.
    - Chris2048 3y ago
      My question is wrt to labels that are self-prescribed, or not. It's also clear that Israel are too cautious about civilian casualties, meaning the war doesn't just affect Hamas.
      - orwin 3y ago
        Aren't too cautious you mean? Because I've just seen how they treat their prisoners and had Flashback of ISIS. My opinion listening to Ukrainian civilians and Palestinian civilians, the difference is that at least Russians don't claim to be 'moral' or 'careful', while cheering while an empty UN school explode.
29athrowaway 3y ago
It is not a myth. Roma people and other ethnicities were also targeted by the Nazis and sent to extermination camps. They have perspectives on those events as well.
- asow92 3y ago
  How this was downvoted is beyond saddening. You all should be ashamed of yourselves.
- scarecrowbob 3y ago
  I mean, so were communists, anarchists, and queer folks. The difference is that the folks who own the west agreed that those things were worth killing off, so after the war they reinstated all the folks who were in charge of fighting those things via stuff like Gladio and other anti-leftist post-war operations. So of course they aren't going to teach that fact any more than they'd let folks teach about US chattel slavery or the genocide of indigenous folks who used to live where the US is right now.
andsoitis 3y ago
It gets worse. In one survey from 2020 of GenZ + Millennials in the US (, 63% did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. In the same survey, 11% believe Jews caused the Holocaust. But wait, it gets even worse. Top academic institutions in the US don't have moral clarity the calling for the genocide of Jews, as we witnessed over the last couple of weeks. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/survey-finds-shocking-lack-holocaust-knowledge-among-millennials-gen-z-n1240031 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/survey-finds-shocking-lac...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- john015 3y ago
  [flagged]
graphe 3y ago
What counts as a 'myth'? They may ignore the mainstream information on details but I doubt many are saying nothing happened. The media in this case makes a point that we should know about this genocide, but I wonder what effect holding genocides in public consciousness does? Will remembering that Japanese Americans lost their California land prevent further land seizure? Will knowing about the butchering of native Americans stop their mistreatment? Did denying the Armenian genocide help Azerbaijan take over? Will knowing about the Holocaust or believing it happened prevent Jewish hatred? All the Nazis online either deny the Holocaust or want it to happen. Knowledge doesn't help.
Hayvok 3y ago
> Now for the harder part: why do some young Americans embrace such views? Perhaps surprisingly, education levels do not appear to be the culprit... the proportion of respondents who believe that the Holocaust is a myth is similar across all levels of education. Social media might play a role. According to a 2022 survey from the Pew Research Centre, Americans under 30 are about as likely to trust information on social media as they are to trust national news organisations. More recently Pew found that 32% of those aged 18-29 get their news from TikTok. Question asked. Question answered. There is legitimate debate around the deterioration of news organizations as accurate, trusted sources of information. But TikTok and its ilk are nothing but propaganda vectors, and not in a direction we are going to enjoy going.
pjmorris 3y ago
I recently read 'The Winds of War' and 'War and Remembrance', novels by WW2 US Navy officer Herman Wouk. It is amazing how much history he crams into the narrative, documenting, among many other things, German treatment of the Jews before and during WW2. His hope and the purpose of the books as expressed in the last sentences of 'War and Remembrance' is 'For the rest of us, perhaps. Not for the dead, not for the more than fifty million real dead in the world’s worst catastrophe: victors and vanquished, combatants and civilians, people of so many nations, men, women, and children, all cut down. For them there can be no new earthly dawn. Yet though their bones lie in the darkness of the grave, they will not have died in vain, if their remembrance can lead us from the long, long time of war to the time for peace.' Many attempts have been made to help us remember where humanity has gone wrong. I am prone to despair to see something so well documented being treated as a myth.
- Whoppertime 3y ago
  Sounds like a good read. I finally got around to reading the Long Telegram and found it worth the time
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
Why was this flagged? It intersects with tech with the suggestion that social media may be the culprit.
no_wizard 3y ago
I'm extremely suspect of how the polls were taken. Where these another one of those get paid to be surveyed things that YouGov is known for? What was their sample size? Was it voluntary identification or did they use other means for verifying information? How were the questions asked?
kaiwen1 3y ago
93% of teens use YouTube and 63% use TikTok, and 20% "almost constantly" [1] Imagine if 93% of _all_ people used TikTok "almost constantly", and imagine if the content consisted almost entirely of misinformation causing instability at scale in alarming, obvious ways. Does it matter whether this outcome is driven by malicious foreign actors or uncaring algorithms optimizing profits? Shouldn't it be restricted on principle? Free speech should be protected for individuals and also groups at some scale. But why should entities with vast, nearly universal reach among the youth be permitted to delude them at scale to the detriment of our collective future? This can't be the right answer to free speech. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/12/11/teens-social-media-and-technology-2023/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/12/11/teens-social...
solardev 3y ago
The actual poll is here: https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econTabReport_tT4jyzG.pdf#page=103 https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econTabRepor... (Holocaust question on PDF page 103). From the YouGov story: https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/48112-increasing-numbers-of-americans-say-antisemitism-is-a-serious-problem https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/48112-increasing-... For some context, they polled 1500 young adults who opted in to an online research panel. They asked them more than 100 questions, about everything from antisemitism to abortion. The "Holocaust is a myth" question comes after several about whether Israel is an apartheid state, is trying to wipe out Palestinians, the Jews have too much power, etc. It's not a simple one off question about the Holocaust, but an entire framing about Jews, Israel and Hamas. ---------- I question how representative the 1500 respondents really are. Which young person is going to want to spend time answering 100+ questions on a survey about Israel? How many 18 to 35s even read or care about the Economist? The results for most of the Jewish questions in the 18 to 35 group lined up pretty neatly pro vs anti (Israel). Maybe they just got sick of answering so many similar questions. Shrug. I wouldn't necessarily draw too strong a conclusion from a poll like this, about a topic like this, at a time like this. It seems designed to capture the most inflamed opinions (at the expense of a more silent majority).

58 points by 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

syntaxers 3y ago

https://archive.is/pnMP7 https://archive.is/pnMP7

AlgorithmicTime 3y ago

[dead]

CapitalistCartr 3y ago

More than one in five young Americans doesn't know when WWI & WWII were, what countries were on which side, why they started, or what's imortant about them. But these kids will get better, same as we did. This headline isn't good, but I wouldn't take it too badly.

gottorf 3y ago
> But these kids will get better, same as we did. Education standards in America has been falling no matter which way you look at it. That will have to reverse first.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  The article states that the trend spans education levels.
  - gottorf 3y ago
    Education levels != education standards. Consider that GPAs have been going up over time[0], so much so that nearly 80% of all grades at Harvard in recent years were As and A-s. [0]: https://mises.org/power-market/grade-inflation-harvard-and-yale-80-students-get https://mises.org/power-market/grade-inflation-harvard-and-y... [1]: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/10/5/faculty-debate-grade-inflation-compression/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/10/5/faculty-debate-...
grok25 3y ago
[dead]
yalue 3y ago
The issue is that the "young" demographic mentioned in the article is ages 18-29, and high school must have changed quite a bit in recent years if students have not actually heard about the holocaust or WWII.
- JeffSnazz 3y ago
  We'd have to compare against a similar poll from decades ago to figure out if this true—it could be it used to be that 40% of kids didn't believe in it.
- sybercecurity 3y ago
  Well, in my (Gen-X) high school history classes, we only got to WWI (and just after like the 1920's - 30's). I always thought that there is this weird assumption that things that happened in the teachers' lifetime or just previous are "already known" or that the culture will just implant that knowledge somehow.
  - gspencley 3y ago
    Same here (also Gen-X). Here in Canada I never learned about WWII in school. I barely remember learning about WWI, and that was usually just around Remembrance Day (celebrated on the anniversary of the Versailles Treaty). We learned a lot about early Canadian settlement and relations between Europeans and First Nations. By the time I found myself in high school we only needed to take a certain amount of "social studies" credits and, while history was included in that category, there were options that were not specific to history. My experiences learning about Canadian settlement had been so dry and boring that I had made up my mind that I didn't like history at all and so I made every choice in high school to opt out of having to take history classes. In other words, WWI and WWII, if they were taught at all were "optional."
    - verdverm 3y ago
      If you'd like to learn about WW2, I cannot over recommend this YT channel. Fantastic quality and production. https://youtube.com/@WorldWarTwo https://youtube.com/@WorldWarTwo
thaumasiotes 3y ago
Once all the Germans were warlike, and mean but that couldn't happen again. We taught them a lesson in 1918, and they've hardly bothered us since then!
thelastgallon 3y ago
If they don't know, the answer would be don't know, but not making up their mind that its a myth.
varelse 3y ago
[dead]

ipsin 3y ago

My brain immediately translated the headline into "One in five young Americans is a trollish little asshole." It's well known that actual belief and poll answers do not align, but here in particular I feel like there's an impish desire to give the "wrong" answer, and that's what the poll is measuring, rather than simple misinformation.

grok25 3y ago
[dead]
_ea1k 3y ago
You make a good point. And 20% is only slightly high for such a result.

j-bos 3y ago

A lot of these stories feel like symptoms of a breakdown in trust. Authorities, institutions, and media of types have been caught lying; so from individual perspective with limited context, never been to the camps, never watched the trials, never met a survivor, there's not much to hang a belief on. I have caught myself in some similar doubts about certain current events, it was only in connecting to real human people from both sides who lost loved ones that I remembered, ah, yeah, this stuff does happen.

mrits 3y ago

There is a difference in what you answer on a poll and what you believe. The most obvious answer is when you are asked a controversial political question and even though you don't agree with it your political party does so answer it according to what is in your best interest and not what you actually believe.

grok25 3y ago
[dead]
webstrand 3y ago
The Economist is right-wing, it's just a measure of their reader demographics which would tend to appreciate holocaust conspiracy theories.
- asow92 3y ago
  The Economist is center-right. Those theories have nothing to do with the rational center. Only the uneducated, far-right, and far-left are espousing that kind of nonsense today.
verdverm 3y ago
Yup, there was another poll that spurred bad reporting, with regards to the US and acceptability of using violence against people with different political beliefs, had it in the range of 30% for both sides iirc Turns out the poll was really bad, with one of the contributions being people who essentially troll the pollsters for the lulz

afavour 3y ago

> According to a 2022 survey from the Pew Research Centre, Americans under 30 are about as likely to trust information on social media as they are to trust national news organisations. A real “be careful what you wish for” tale. When I think back to the advent of the World Wide Web, breaking the mainstream media’s hold on information distribution seemed like such a wonderful possibility. Fast forward a few decades and here we are: corporate controlled social media networks are indiscriminately pushing absolutely anything that keeps eyeballs engaged in front of their users who treat it all as fact. I can’t quite say I’m nostalgic for the days of mainstream media domination but it feels increasingly like we jumped from the frying pan into the fire. At least it was accountable: you might not like an article the Washington Post or the New York Times published but you’d know who wrote it and you’d know who published it. If you didn’t want to read it you could just not read the paper any more. Now we have faceless anonymous social media accounts pushing any old crap and the networks themselves holding up their hands and saying “who, me? Oh, that’s nothing to do with me!”.

ericmay 3y ago
With the proliferation of AI content creation tools as the catalyst, we're going to go from a natural decentralization cycle to a natural centralization cycle which will be bringing trust back to sources like WSJ and NBC nightly news. Obviously you still have to keep your guard up but that was never and will never be not true. Further, many of the social media sources today will work to show "real" sources versus AI generated content, etc. and that will result in some of those sources themselves just becoming centralized authorities on what is generated and what is not, though that job is more difficult.
- pgsandstrom 3y ago
  I guess you mean to say that we will go back to centralization since nothing decentralized can be trusted, with how easy it will become to fake facts. But that's assuming that the consumer primarily cares about truth. If that was the case, we would not be here to begin with.
  - 3y ago

jeffbee 3y ago

Recently I've met some intensely stupid kids in the city of Berkeley who keep showing up at city council hearings to shout and bang drums and demand that the city pass a pro-Hamas resolution condemning Israel. It's jarring because half these fools are somehow mixing the Palestinian scarf and rainbow flags, unaware, apparently, that Hamas would throw them off the tops of buildings for the crime of being gay. Young people are spending way too much time on tiktok and hardly any at all on critical thinking.

Chris2048 3y ago
Is "pro-Hamas" how they describe their actions, or how you describe them?
- jeffbee 3y ago
  A person who demands a cease-fire in an asymmetric war in which Hamas did the first strike is pro-Hamas.
  - xahrepap 3y ago
    That’s absolutely false. I can be disgusted at both. I can be more disgusted at how much more terrible Israel’s destruction is AND be disgusted that Hamas attacked in the first place. And still not be pro-either-side. The amount of death and the kind of death happening is disgusting. Period. I think the “stupid” ones, to borrow your word, are the ones refusing to see that.
  - Chris2048 3y ago
    My question is wrt to labels that are self-prescribed, or not. It's also clear that Israel are too cautious about civilian casualties, meaning the war doesn't just affect Hamas.
    - orwin 3y ago
      Aren't too cautious you mean? Because I've just seen how they treat their prisoners and had Flashback of ISIS. My opinion listening to Ukrainian civilians and Palestinian civilians, the difference is that at least Russians don't claim to be 'moral' or 'careful', while cheering while an empty UN school explode.

29athrowaway 3y ago

It is not a myth. Roma people and other ethnicities were also targeted by the Nazis and sent to extermination camps. They have perspectives on those events as well.

asow92 3y ago
How this was downvoted is beyond saddening. You all should be ashamed of yourselves.
scarecrowbob 3y ago
I mean, so were communists, anarchists, and queer folks. The difference is that the folks who own the west agreed that those things were worth killing off, so after the war they reinstated all the folks who were in charge of fighting those things via stuff like Gladio and other anti-leftist post-war operations. So of course they aren't going to teach that fact any more than they'd let folks teach about US chattel slavery or the genocide of indigenous folks who used to live where the US is right now.

andsoitis 3y ago

It gets worse. In one survey from 2020 of GenZ + Millennials in the US (, 63% did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. In the same survey, 11% believe Jews caused the Holocaust. But wait, it gets even worse. Top academic institutions in the US don't have moral clarity the calling for the genocide of Jews, as we witnessed over the last couple of weeks. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/survey-finds-shocking-lack-holocaust-knowledge-among-millennials-gen-z-n1240031 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/survey-finds-shocking-lac...

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
john015 3y ago
[flagged]

graphe 3y ago

What counts as a 'myth'? They may ignore the mainstream information on details but I doubt many are saying nothing happened. The media in this case makes a point that we should know about this genocide, but I wonder what effect holding genocides in public consciousness does? Will remembering that Japanese Americans lost their California land prevent further land seizure? Will knowing about the butchering of native Americans stop their mistreatment? Did denying the Armenian genocide help Azerbaijan take over? Will knowing about the Holocaust or believing it happened prevent Jewish hatred? All the Nazis online either deny the Holocaust or want it to happen. Knowledge doesn't help.

Hayvok 3y ago

> Now for the harder part: why do some young Americans embrace such views? Perhaps surprisingly, education levels do not appear to be the culprit... the proportion of respondents who believe that the Holocaust is a myth is similar across all levels of education. Social media might play a role. According to a 2022 survey from the Pew Research Centre, Americans under 30 are about as likely to trust information on social media as they are to trust national news organisations. More recently Pew found that 32% of those aged 18-29 get their news from TikTok. Question asked. Question answered. There is legitimate debate around the deterioration of news organizations as accurate, trusted sources of information. But TikTok and its ilk are nothing but propaganda vectors, and not in a direction we are going to enjoy going.

pjmorris 3y ago

I recently read 'The Winds of War' and 'War and Remembrance', novels by WW2 US Navy officer Herman Wouk. It is amazing how much history he crams into the narrative, documenting, among many other things, German treatment of the Jews before and during WW2. His hope and the purpose of the books as expressed in the last sentences of 'War and Remembrance' is 'For the rest of us, perhaps. Not for the dead, not for the more than fifty million real dead in the world’s worst catastrophe: victors and vanquished, combatants and civilians, people of so many nations, men, women, and children, all cut down. For them there can be no new earthly dawn. Yet though their bones lie in the darkness of the grave, they will not have died in vain, if their remembrance can lead us from the long, long time of war to the time for peace.' Many attempts have been made to help us remember where humanity has gone wrong. I am prone to despair to see something so well documented being treated as a myth.

Whoppertime 3y ago
Sounds like a good read. I finally got around to reading the Long Telegram and found it worth the time

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

Why was this flagged? It intersects with tech with the suggestion that social media may be the culprit.

no_wizard 3y ago

I'm extremely suspect of how the polls were taken. Where these another one of those get paid to be surveyed things that YouGov is known for? What was their sample size? Was it voluntary identification or did they use other means for verifying information? How were the questions asked?

kaiwen1 3y ago

93% of teens use YouTube and 63% use TikTok, and 20% "almost constantly" [1] Imagine if 93% of _all_ people used TikTok "almost constantly", and imagine if the content consisted almost entirely of misinformation causing instability at scale in alarming, obvious ways. Does it matter whether this outcome is driven by malicious foreign actors or uncaring algorithms optimizing profits? Shouldn't it be restricted on principle? Free speech should be protected for individuals and also groups at some scale. But why should entities with vast, nearly universal reach among the youth be permitted to delude them at scale to the detriment of our collective future? This can't be the right answer to free speech. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/12/11/teens-social-media-and-technology-2023/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/12/11/teens-social...

solardev 3y ago

The actual poll is here: https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econTabReport_tT4jyzG.pdf#page=103 https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econTabRepor... (Holocaust question on PDF page 103). From the YouGov story: https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/48112-increasing-numbers-of-americans-say-antisemitism-is-a-serious-problem https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/48112-increasing-... For some context, they polled 1500 young adults who opted in to an online research panel. They asked them more than 100 questions, about everything from antisemitism to abortion. The "Holocaust is a myth" question comes after several about whether Israel is an apartheid state, is trying to wipe out Palestinians, the Jews have too much power, etc. It's not a simple one off question about the Holocaust, but an entire framing about Jews, Israel and Hamas. ---------- I question how representative the 1500 respondents really are. Which young person is going to want to spend time answering 100+ questions on a survey about Israel? How many 18 to 35s even read or care about the Economist? The results for most of the Jewish questions in the 18 to 35 group lined up pretty neatly pro vs anti (Israel). Maybe they just got sick of answering so many similar questions. Shrug. I wouldn't necessarily draw too strong a conclusion from a poll like this, about a topic like this, at a time like this. It seems designed to capture the most inflamed opinions (at the expense of a more silent majority).