Countering Holocaust Distortion in Italy: Education in the Age of Social Media and AI

This Perspective examines Holocaust distortion in Italy as a socially and technologically mediated form of memory politics rather than simply as historical misinformation. It situates contemporary distortion within unresolved Italian memories of Fascism and the Shoah, showing how selective remembrance, the displacement of responsibility, and self-exculpatory national narratives continue to shape the ways Holocaust memory is mobilized in public discourse. Particular attention is paid to the role of social media, where minimization, trivialization, symbolic appropriation, false analogies, and victim-perpetrator reversals circulate within highly polarized communicative environments. The article reviews the strengths and limitations of Italy’s established infrastructure for Holocaust remembrance and education and argues that factual correction alone is insufficient to address contemporary forms of distortion. Drawing on the *Proteggi i Fatti* campaign as an illustrative case, it also considers the potential of AI-assisted analysis for identifying recurring patterns of distortion in large-scale social media data, while stressing the need for historically informed qualitative interpretation. The article concludes by proposing an educational approach that integrates historical knowledge with civic, digital, media, and reflexive literacies, including the ability to evaluate the responsible use of historical comparison.