use every day to make billions of posts about picture-perfect lives, perfect figures, shaped pastries and cute dogs.
The issue of deciphering the intentions of the person sitting on the other side of the fibre optic cable, creating a post or comment according to intentions known only to themselves, is an extremely complicated matter. Therefore, those communicating online on behalf of the museum must exercise particular caution and act proportionately.
Sometimes, as Pawel Sawicki tells us, there is a temptation to respond to each person. Or wade into every discussion, yet some provoke and try to drag the museum into a brawl. The Auschwitz Museum Press Office is continuously learning how to avoid such situations. As Paweł Sawicki points out, they have a fuse in the back of their heads: the idea that they are not publishing content on their behalf but as representatives of a fundamental global institution.
Selfies in Auschwitz? It is inappropriate
Each social profile of the Auschwitz Museum has its distinct character, task and method of operation. Facebook is for slightly longer content. Twitter - abridged stories of victims. And Instagram, like Instagram – is to show photos, such as those taken by visitors to the Memorial, which, of course, have been frozen in the era of the coronavirus pandemic. The photos vary. We all remember, for example, those cute, smiling photos against the background of the camp barracks and the tracks leading to the prisoner unloading ramp or the barbed wires surrounding the camp.
- We once discussed selfies in the Museum. There have been calls for people to be banned from bringing cameras altogether. But people take pictures like this, and it’s our modern way of communicating. They are not all inappropriate by definition. Perhaps some people cannot express their emotions otherwise? It is always necessary to consider a person’s motivation and be careful about reacting too quickly. An attempt to emotionally stigmatise people in social media may trigger a wave of negative comments, which in effect may turn into a form of hounding - says Paweł Sawicki, a representative of the memorial, which is a monument to what hounding of some people against others can effectuate.