Something has been bothering me for a while about the way Holocaust testimony travels on social media.

I will post a short Story of Lola, one of the survivors I have interviewed, telling what happened to her in her own words. Nothing graphic. Nothing recreated or sensationalized. Just her face, her voice and her testimony.

I check the views: perhaps 150.

Then I post something completely ordinary, my children on vacation, a beach, a moment from everyday life.

More than 1,000 views.

And I want to be very clear about the distinction: I am not talking about likes. I am talking about views.

Whether people liked one Story more than another is irrelevant. I am talking about whether they were given the opportunity to see it in the first place.

It happens with Joseph. With Hedy. With other survivors whose testimonies I share.

Sometimes the difference in reach is so striking that it is difficult not to wonder what happened between one Story and the next.

Was it a word the survivor used? An image? A reference to Auschwitz, a death march or a gas chamber? Did an automated system classify the testimony as violent, disturbing or “sensitive”?

I don’t know. And that is precisely what troubles me.

I have seen this pattern often enough that I have started testing it myself. A piece of testimony from Lola, Joseph or Hedy will barely move. The next Story, family, travel, ordinary life, suddenly reaches many times more people.

Maybe there is an innocent explanation for every instance. I cannot see inside an algorithm, and I cannot prove why one particular Story reached 150 people while another reached more than 1,000. But I know what I see.

And it raises a much larger question about what happens when algorithms become the invisible gatekeepers of historical memory.

Most people understand content moderation. A post violates a platform’s rules and is removed.........

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