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Teachers in schools across the Netherlands are struggling with a surge of disinformation relating to the Holocaust that they believe students are seeing on social media, according to a new survey.
Over 190 teachers from secondary schools in the Netherlands responded to a poll from NOS Stories, a branch of the Dutch public broadcaster.
The students “no longer know what is real and what is fake because of AI and TikTok,” history teacher Maarten Post told NOS.
Post said he preferred students who reach out to him and ask about the issue rather than drawing their own conclusions based on online disinformation.
“I am very happy that they come to me with those questions … then you can explain it and start a conversation.”
In one example, Post said students showed him a TikTok video that claimed the World War II Nazi German government killed 271,000 Jews, a significantly misconstrued and minimised figure.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) estimates that six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust across Europe — approximately two-thirds of the entire prewar European Jewish population of around nine million.
Euronews Next reached out to Tiktok for comment but did not receive an immediate reply.
One third of the teachers surveyed said that their student’s knowledge is “substandard,” and four out of ten teachers believe their students downplay the severity of the Holocaust.
This is not just an issue in the Netherlands.
In January, German Holocaust memorial institutions wrote an open letter to social media platforms, demanding to stop the spread of fake images aimed at distorting Holocaust history and memorialisation.
The Auschwitz Memorial Museum also said that AI was being used to generate fake images of Holocaust victims, in a “profound act of disrespect”.
Last year, Elon Musk’s AI platform Grok made various misleading or false statements about the Holocaust after a system update, leading to an investigation by French prosecutors.