Meet the Censored: Hitler
Can history itself violate community standards?
Matt Taibbi Jul 30
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Hitler, premustache change.
100 years ago yesterday — on July 29, 1921 — Adolph Hitler was elected leader of the
Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party, later known as the Nazi Party. The
combustible Army corporal succeeded the party’s original leader, Anton Drexler, whom
Hitler originally been sent to spy on, but whose ideas he came to admire (he may even have
shaved his mustache to emulate his predecessor). The 533-1 delegate vote set in motion a
series of events that would dominate the next two and a half decades of world history.
A young Jewish Internet commentator named Manny Marotta wanted to call attention to the
date, for educational purposes. Marotta has been maintaining popular accounts on both
Twitter and Instagram called 100 Years Ago Live. His simple, clever, and enlightening
mission is to describe history as an actual contemporary might have, in the language of
modern social media tools. It’s popular, earning 26,000 followers on Twitter.
Marotta’s accounts remind us that the past was once news, that stories we now remember as
ossified, fixed narratives captured in black and white were once fresh, suspenseful events,
that filled contemporaries with excitement, and uncertainty.
Whether it’s a snapshot of a socialist congress in Lille, France that at the time might have
seemed the beginning of a global Western revolution, or a cartoon showing both sides of the
prohibition debate that showed how extremes of opinion dominated discourse even back
then, Marotta has a nice touch for putting readers in the mood of the era, while keeping our
thoughts in the present. He is very much the opposite of a Nazi or a fascist, and posts about
history in the hope that people will learn from it. “I have a step-grandmother who’s a
Holocaust survivor,” he says. “That’s part of the reason I started the account.”
His Instagram post on Hitler’s ascension to the status of leader of the Nazi Party looked like
this:
A tweet marking the same event appeared as follows:
1921 Live @100YearsAgoLive
After the war, disillusioned and bankrupt, the odd little Corporal worked as an intelligence agent for
the government. While gathering information on the new German Workers’ Party, he grew fond of it
and joined it. Today, he’s become its leader.
July 29th 2021
7 Retweets34 Likes
There is no politicking or advocacy observable here, not as standalone posts and still less in
the context of hundreds of other entries about other scenes as disparate as Thomas Edison
taking a nap under a tree, a woman on Tremont Street in Boston turning heads by wearing
pants, or a Soviet ship shelled in the Russian Civil War.
Nonetheless, Instagram pulled Marotta’s post on Hitler’s election, saying it violated
“community guidelines.” When he appealed the decision, the rejected him again, saying his
content went against their guidelines on “violence or dangerous organizations”:
Since the beginning of the “content moderation” movement, a major problem has become
apparent. Human beings simply create too much content on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube,
and Instagram for other human beings to review. Machines have proven able to identify
clearly inappropriate content like child pornography (though even there the algorithms
occasionally stumbled, as in the case of Facebook’s removal of the famous “Running Girl”
photo).
But asking computer programs to sort out the subtleties of different types of speech —
differences between commentary and advocacy, criticism and incitement, reporting and
participation — has proven a disaster. A theme running through nearly all of the “Meet the
Censored” articles is this problem of algorithmic censorship systematically throwing out
babies with bathwater.
Whether it’s YouTube cracking down on videographer Ford Fischer for covering events
involving Holocaust deniers or white supremacists, the same platform zapping footage of the
January 6th riots shot by Jon Farina of Status Coup, or Matt Orfalea being punished
for violating a “criminal organizations policy” for a spoof coffee commercial involving a
mass-murderer, Internet carriers have consistently shown they cannot or will not distinguish
between, say, being a Nazi and criticizing one, joking about one, even warning about one.
The frightening thing about the 100YearsAgoLive incident is that it’s not hard to see this
becoming a trend, where history itself is deemed to violate common decency. The whole
idea of historical education is to prevent future horrors via graphic warnings from the past.
Survivors of the Holocaust have always been adamant that we must “Never Forget,” that
places such as Auschwitz must never be buried or hidden away but instead displayed
prominently, made into lasting cultural artifacts whose purpose is to be so conspicuous as to
prevent the natural human impulse to whitewash our sadly expansive history of evil.
In the name of combating hate speech, violence, conspiracy theory, etc., Internet platforms
are removing not just advocacy, but knowledge, in a wide-ranging effort that may help the
companies create a more frictionless, commercially successful product, but will impede the
past from chastening the present. If the aim is preventing the spread of hateful ideas, nothing
could be more counter-productive that cleaning away the record of their real-world impact.
This 100YearsAgoLive episode seems like a silly glitch at first, a parody of Internet
censorship, but it’s no joke — if we’re going to put machines in charge of cleaning our
mental universes, the past is going to be one of the first casualties.
I reached out to Marotta:
TK: Can you tell us a little about the idea behind “100 Years Ago Live”?
Marotta: I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh two years ago. While there, in
January 2018, I became interested in WWI history and decided to create a Twitter account
that would “live-tweet” the events of the final year of WWI, as if I was a reporter on the
ground. While there are certainly Twitter accounts that deal with historical subjects, none
put themselves in the first-person, and act as if they are experiencing history, and so I
decided to do that.
The account caught on and many people enjoyed the format. Its mission is to provide
historical education in a fun and engaging way. I have had to report on some sensitive
subjects. Most notably, this past May/June, there occurred the anniversary of the Tulsa Race
Massacre. I took care to do thorough research on the subject and report on it in real-time
with the utmost objectivity and respect for the victims. There was no censorship of this
reporting.
Yesterday’s tweet/Instagram post was the first time in which the social media platform
removed the post, accusing it of promoting hate. Hitler’s rise to power is, of course, one of
the hallmark historical events of the 1920s and 1930s, and I intend to cover it often. This
will be difficult if I cannot post the man’s name and image in any place.
TK: What happened yesterday?
Marotta: The purpose of this account is to provide historical education by reporting events
from 100 years ago in real time. With that said, we espouse no extremist nor hateful views,
even if they were expressed 100 years ago. 100 years ago yesterday, Adolf Hitler was made
Führer of the Nazi Party. We reported on this story with the same caption for both Twitter
and Instagram, explaining that Hitler had become Fuhrer and a little background
information. There was no hateful imagery or view espoused in reporting on this objective
fact. Within 20 minutes, Instagram took down the photo of Hitler, with the note that the post
promoted hate speech and extremism. Given that it was literally a photograph of Hitler with
the caption that he was made Führer, I appealed the decision. They struck it down once
again.
TK: Do you think this was a human being making a decision, or a machine?
Marotta: This appears to be a result of an algorithm failing to distinguish between images
used in an educational context, and images used in a hateful context. I believe that no human
reviewed my case, and that the algorithm blindly struck it down because of the word
“Hitler” and a depiction of the man.
TK: What do you think the rationale behind this kind of moderation is? If you have any
idea, what’s your opinion on this brand of speech regulation?
Marotta: I believe that Instagram does this to protect their advertising viability, and because
they cannot moderate each and every case, an automatic algorithm is applied. However, this
serves as a detriment to historical education. I am Jewish, and Holocaust education is vital to
my beliefs system. If I cannot provide context on Hitler’s rise to power, then Holocaust
education becomes difficult.
TK: Can history violate “community guidelines”?
Marotta: There are certain situations in which I could understand a decision like that. If you
had a violent or gratuitous image from the past, I could perhaps understand… But there is no
situation in which you can justify suppressing just the image of a human being who
happened to be an evil dictator. That is censorship of education itself.
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