A growing number of young people lack knowledge of the essential facts of the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazis. Amid growing division, Holocaust education offers young people of all backgrounds a vital lesson on the dangers of prejudice, discrimination, and hatred.
The ADL Holocaust Education Teen campaign was designed to bring lessons of the Holocaust directly to young people and put them on alert to the types of misinformation that would seek to deny people of those same lessons. We centered on the authentic testimony of Holocaust survivors and well-documented historical facts.
Our goals were to reach a wide teen audience, increase awareness of the need for quality Holocaust education, and push back against misinformation. The campaign also aimed to gather information from users about their own experience with Holocaust education.
As the campaign focused on educating a broad swatch of young people, success was measured in impressions, reach, and watch time, with an eye toward safeguarding content from online trolls and agitators.
To reach teens where they are most engaged, we worked with large and small influencers:
Smaller influencers engaged included Holocaust survivor Tova Friedman, along with a number of young people whose Jewish identity is a prominent theme: @B3cky.dc, @Thatjewishteen, and @Israelwithcindy. Working with influencers was a way for us to reach our audience with voices they trust. Viewers were encouraged to visit SpotLiesSpreadFacts.org to hear more stories directly from Holocaust survivors and get tips on avoiding misinformation. We used paid media buys to boost influencer content on TikTok and Snapchat and drive more viewers to our landing page.
ADL partnered with TikTok's policy team to bring this campaign through pre-approval at every stage – from concept, to landing page development, to influencer script reviews and final pre-approvals before launch. After initial approval and successful launch, our ads were abruptly rejected after 11 days and our entire ad account was suspended. The feedback we received from TikTok was that initial approvals were re-reviewed by another policy person and were deemed too political and polarizing to target youth. This was particularly frustrating because the Holocaust is not political – it is history – and platforms like TikTok are the worst offenders for organically spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories and politicizing misinformation. Additionally, TikTok retroactively disallowed the “Learn More” call-to-action button.
To get our ad account reinstated and resume our campaign, we were required to edit the videos to remove calls to “fight misinformation” – and to remove warnings that the Holocaust could happen again. To their credit, TikTok’s ad team was responsive when it came to getting our account up and running again, even though we completely disagreed with their reasoning for the suspension.
Since buttons to “Learn More” were not allowed, we pivoted to interactive polls that ask “Have you received sufficient education on the Holocaust? This mid-campaign pivot to navigate TikTok's opaque policy proved fruitful.
The campaign reached nearly 11 million unique users (age 13-17) across 120 posts, 8 influencers and 5 social platforms. We also received 180,242 responses to our poll question, “Have you received sufficient education on the Holocaust?”
Nearly 40% of users 13-17 years old indicated they had not received sufficient Holocaust education, highlighting the need for this type of campaign.
We consider this campaign a success because more young people are more aware of the horrible atrocities that humans are capable of when hatred, prejudice, and discrimination are allowed to fester. It is our hope that this campaign helped to inoculate the next generation against the types of misinformation that led to the Holocaust.
