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MEMORIAL AND MUSEUM AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU FORMER GERMAN NAZI
CONCENTRATION AND EXTERMINATION CAMP

News

Stop Hate Speech Online: Cooperation between the Auschwitz Museum and TrollWall AI startup

ps
11-07-2024

The Auschwitz Museum has started a cooperation with TrollWall AI, a startup that specializes in the automatic moderation of hateful comments on social media, based on artificial intelligence models.

 

"As a Museum, we are active on several social media platforms, primarily on X, Facebook, and Instagram. Every day, we publish posts about events from the history of the German Nazi camp Auschwitz, as well as short bios of the victims. The official profiles of the Museum are already followed by nearly 2.5 million people, and the number of comments left each day on our profiles averages 4-5 thousand," said Paweł Sawicki from the Auschwitz Museum, responsible for the Museum's social media activities.

"Most of the comments are diverse expressions of remembrance, emotional reactions to the content presented, or strictly historical questions. Unfortunately, some comments violate the memory of the victims, including denial and antisemitic entries. We also experience daily waves of spam, trolling, phishing bots, or disinformation campaigns. Appropriate moderation is a priority for us. We strive to protect our virtual community of remembrance from hate speech," added Paweł Sawicki.

Faced with this challenge, the Museum decided to start cooperation with the TrollWall AI startup.

TrollWall AI is an artificial intelligence-based tool that automatically and in real-time hides hateful and vulgar comments on social media pages. At the moment it supports Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. The creators of TrollWall AI rely on international legal standards defining hate speech.

"We have the right to freedom of speech, but not to hate speech. By automatically moderating hateful comments, we create a safe, hate-free online space for those following the Museum on social media," said Tomáš Halász, CEO and co-founder of TrollWall AI.

As part of the cooperation, the Museum gained access to all functionalities of the service.

"In the tests we conducted, the tool proved to be very effective. Importantly, TrollWall AI conducts automatic moderation in many different languages, which is particularly crucial in our case. We can also add various keywords to the system. Of course, the tool does not fully replace the work of a moderator, but it provides additional security and an extra wall, especially on Facebook and Instagram. Moreover, using the system speeds up moderation, allowing us more time to prepare more content for publication," emphasized Paweł Sawicki.

Activities on social media are an important part of the educational mission of the Memorial. Content published on the official accounts of the Museum reaches nearly 2.5 million people:

X (formerly Twitter) – 1.6 million followers
Facebook – 556 thousand
Instagram – 179 thousand
Mastodon – 93 thousand
Threads – 40 thousand