substantial group of followers. Last year he wrote: - Is it easy to follow the @AuschwitzMuseum account? No. It is, indeed, one of the most painful and harrowing accounts on Twitter. It is also a reminder of one of the darkest periods in human history that we must #NEVERForget.
His support and outreach helped to achieve another threshold in the number of followers. For the 75th anniversary of the camp’s liberation, which falls on 27 January 2020, the museum has decided to reach 750,000 followers on its Twitter account. With the commitment of people from all over the world - including the Hamill mentioned above - the number surpassed one million just two days before the anniversary commemoration.
However, it’s not the race for fans that’s the issue; it’s the coverage that helps when there are misrepresentations, fake news or plain Auschwitz lies. Sawicki cannot imagine that the Memorial would not speak up in such situations.
For instance, when Kurt Schlichter, a right-wing columnist for the Townhall news service, claimed that anyone who supported Barack Obama and John Kerry would “make a great aide at Auschwitz”. The museum responded: “The tragedy of the Auschwitz prisoners and their complicated moral dilemmas, which we cannot understand today, should not be instrumentalised”.
- We use Twitter for fact-checking; we also correct journalists. I have adopted the principle that we can pass on an article if it does not contain factual errors. Occasionally, Internet users also bring to our attention errors in the media that they have noticed. The force of this community is immense. For instance, there was a time when we were able to remove Nazi literature from Amazon thanks to this force - says Sawicki.
Generation clash
The Auschwitz Museum’s social media profiles are an extension of the institution itself. What is unacceptable at the Memorial cannot happen on the museum’s Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter accounts.