“If you tell a lie long enough, it becomes the truth.”
This quote is often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s infamous chief propagandist, and it illustrates the founding principle of Nazi propaganda: repetition reinforces indoctrination. Hitler himself laid out this principle in “Mein Kampf,” writing that “these slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the ideas that have been put forward.”
While both Hitler and Goebbels died by suicide before the Allies ended the war, neither their ideas nor methods died with them in their bunkers. Instead, Nazi propaganda, in both methods and content, is flourishing in a perhaps unexpected place today: social media.
When we scroll through our feeds, the information we see, the endless arrays of dog videos, advertisements, and occasional lectures, are not randomly selected. Instead, they are carefully chosen by algorithms intended to maximize the time we spend online. After all, the social media giants whose platforms guide our lives are not charities; they are businesses, and businesses exist solely to make a profit.
For social media sites, this profit comes primarily in the form of ad revenue, and the best ads are those most precisely attuned to the desires, beliefs, and biases of their intended audience, us. This is why our phones seem to be listening. In a way, they are.
While the algorithm’s sole purpose is to figure out who we are and what we want so it can better serve us, it is simultaneously burrowing us deeper and deeper into our own personalized echo chambers. The result is something terrifyingly similar to the propaganda that Goebbels’ mills were churning out nearly a century ago.
The similarities aren’t just structural, as social media is inadvertently disseminating Nazi beliefs while mimicking its propaganda format, a process that Cardiff University professor Mathew Williams has termed “algorithmic antisemitism.”
This isn’t just a conspiracy theory for Ye to tweet about in his next rant. In the past few years, due in large part to the COVID-19 pandemic, social media use has exploded.
With the increase in usage, however, came a tidal wave increase in antisemitic posts. According to Weismann and Masri, two researchers from Brandeis University, TikTok saw a 41% increase in antisemitic posts, a 912% increase in antisemitic comments, and a whopping 1,375% increase in antisemitic usernames between 2020 and 2021.
In short, antisemitism is going viral and has been doing so for years.
To the Nazis and social media algorithms, the truth is irrelevant. What matters is the repetition of targeted messaging, regardless of the harmful ideas propagated as a result. But this begs the question: how do we combat hate in the digital age? The answer is knowledge.
If we arm ourselves with the tools we need to fight against the unseen machinations of content algorithms and digital echo chambers, we can stand against the Nazism of the past still haunting us in the present.
