Technology, Memory, and the Future of Holocaust Remembrance

Hello, everyone. Greetings, Excellencies, friends and colleagues, and especially those who have braved the weather to make it into UN Headquarters today. And hello to everybody online. It's great that we have this possibility as well, because it's kind of treacherous out there. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Melissa Fleming, and I lead communications for the United Nations.

And also, as many of you know, our department runs the Holocaust and Outreach program. And so we're very pleased to be able to bring this really important discussion to you today. It's called Technology, Memory and the Future of Holocaust remembrance. And it's in partnership with the Institute for Technology and Human Rights at the World Jewish Congress. I think we are all aware that technology is playing an increasingly central role, and not only positive, I'm afraid, in how the world remembers, teaches and learns about the Holocaust.

On the positive side, digital archives preserve thousands of survival testimonies. Facial recognition tools help identify individuals long lost to history, while online databases have the possibility to reconnect families to find relatives lost to the genocide. But these same technologies can undermine truth. Artificial intelligence has been generating fabricated Holocaust testimonies. Social media algorithms have been amplifying denial and distortion, and deep fakes are manipulating historical footage.

And anti Semitic conspiracies are spreading at alarming speed and scale. And the threat is not just to the content, just the content itself that's being created, but it's the architecture that delivers it. When platforms prioritize engagement at the cost of accuracy, these information ecosystems become breeding grounds for hate speech. And that hate is often rewarded by the very algorithms that keep us scrolling. Yet technology also equips us with solutions.

And some platforms now redirect Holocaust denial searches towards verified educational resources. I'm very pleased we have someone from Meta here today on the panel who can explain how that works. On Meta platforms, we also have streaming services partnering with institutions to host authenticated survivor testimonies. These voluntary measures are encouraging, but they must become universal standards. And I just like to mention that we have at the UN the UN Global Principles for Information Integrity, and it was launched by the secretary general in 2024.

And it provides a clear framework calling on all stakeholders, including governments and tech companies, to take responsibility with a simple message. Build information environments where truth can thrive, where discrimination and hate cannot, where accurate, reliable information is available to all, and where freedom of expression is fully enjoyed. Technology is not neutral, and this means demanding safety by design. Tech companies need to be transparent about how their algorithms curate history and also accountable when they spread harm the choices we make now and how we design, govern and deploy these technologies will determine whether truth prevails over falsehood and whether, most importantly, the dignity and rights of every person are protected. The way forward requires a clear resolve, not just from all of us, but more, because we need collective action.

And I look forward to this conversation today and to the insights from this distinguished panel who are working on this very subject so we can explore together how technology can be used to safeguard memory and uphold the lessons of the Holocaust for generations to come. So it is my pleasure now to hand over to today's moderator, Dr. Ifut Barack Cheney. Dr. Barak Cheney is the World Jewish Congress's Director of International affairs and Director of Technology and Human Rights. The floor is yours.

There you go. Thank you. Thank you, Under Secretary Fleming, and good afternoon. I am very excited because the last few days were very full of uncertainty about this. So thank you for being here, for kind of warming up this room with us, and thank you for everybody livestreaming this event.

So my name is Ifat Barak Cheney. I am the Executive Director of the Institute for Technology and Human Rights at the World Jewish Congress. And I also deal with our international affairs. We're a small organization, so we all multitask a lot. I'm also very happy today to finally not need to remind us of any Israeli hostages in the hands of terrorist organizations in Gaza with the body of really returning home.

So this event is organized together with the UN Holocaust Program. And really a huge thank you to the team who made it possible in very harsh circumstances today and made sure everything is up and functioning. Tracy and her team, and I'll mention you by name later as well. So as mentioned, we're going to explore technology, and our hope is that we will be doing it with some examples of how technology can enhance and maintain Holocaust memory for generations to come and bring it to different avenues and different technologies. So maybe a bit different than the conversations we're used to.

And as the subject is, we are going to have a lot of videos and a lot of demonstrations, so hopefully the tech works well with us. And thank you for the tech team making it in today as well to have a discussion. We'll have a panel, short kind of presentations by our panelists and some time for remarks and questions and discussion. At the end, I do want to open with a short personal story. About 11 years ago, I was looking for a testimony from my grandfather.

He was in the IDP camp in Bergen Belsen after World War II. And I knew that there was somebody recorded his story or took notes of the story. So I went online and I was trying to find just, you know, can I find this story somewhere? He wrote a chapter for a book, and I thought, I'll just find that chapter of the book. And pretty quickly I found an audio recording of my grandfather that nobody in my family knew existed.

An audio recording of him telling parts of his story. We never heard the full story. He would talk a lot before and after. Recorded by Yad Vashem for an interview. I sat there sobbing for about two hours listening to this.

I never thought I'm going to be able to listen to him talking about it again. All the way to. There was. You could hear. My grandparents had like a cuckoo clock in the back.

There we go, a Swiss one. You could hear that in the background. So I was very excited about the technology at that time. And here we are 11 years after, and all I can do is just kind of regret that he's not here to record his testimony in the new technologies that we have to maintain his story. But we will hear about opportunities we are still getting with survivors today to do exactly that.

So this is really important discussion for me and very exciting. And with that, we're going to start our panel.

Our first speaker here today is Professor Victoria Grace Richardson Walden. She's director of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab and Professor of Digital heritage, Memory and Culture at the University of Sussex. Her her work explores digital Holocaust memory, and she has offered and edited multiple publications in the field. She's editor in chief of Digital Memory Dialogues and recently directed the inaugural Connective Holocaust Commemoration Expo. Vicki, that's okay.

Vicky, why don't you set the stage for us on this one from your research. How is Holocaust memory already changing in digital spaces? And what should we be most careful to protect with the shift?

Thank you. Thank you for having me here today.

I'm very glad to have managed to fly from the uk Our work at the Landech Additional Memory Lab focuses very much on the infrastructure and the backstage of professional heritage and creative spaces of memory production. And so that's the kind of space of which I'm going to focus on in the few words I'm going to say to begin with. But I want to. And I think thank you for mentioning this in the introduction. I want to think about how we can turn talk into action.

So I'm going to do that. Annoying. Next slide, please. Thanks. Sorry.

Thank you. Our research has shown that digital Holocaust memory interventions, whatever their format, tend to remediate historical logics of museum curation. And media logics of the broadcast era of mass media. So just to give a few examples here, we have the guided tour, we have the conversation with the survivor, we have taking photographs of site museums, and we have Holocaust museums. But of course these, you know, that's the long history of these kind of projects.

But we have a VR AR app, we have Dimension and Testament, we have a computer game, we have Second life and we have selfies. We're just in some ways using different language to talk about things that have existed and shaped Holocaust memory in a previous media age. And that's the kind of age of broadcast media. So all of these things have really moved into digital spaces. On one hand, what we found is creative and tech professionals have often been hesitant to exploit the potentials of what you can do with human computer interaction.

And partly due to historical backlash from professional memory sectors. And I know Luke has encountered some of this in his practice. And on the other hand, professional heritage and education spaces are locked into rules about ethics. What we see is a translation of debates and worries around the limits of representation, moving into new arguments about the limits of interactivity. And the provocation or question I would raise here is if digital media is new and each medium is distinct and comes with specific affordances, why aren't we asking what each new medium can do specifically for Holocaust memory and education?

That might be different. Next slide please. So we're facing what we've kind of called a double crisis of Holocaust memory in education. On one hand, it's existential. What are we, what are we doing?

What do we particularly do now? On the other hand, it's sustainable. How do authorities on this topic, that is those who are stewards of historical sites and materials and experts in the field, remain relevant and most importantly visible in this kind of ever increasing digital memory scape? And I want to emphasize three points on this. Firstly, we struggle to agree shared values and purpose of Holocaust education.

Internationally, IRA research and other research papers have expressed this. We struggle to identify and measure what successful Holocaust education looks like. And we're even worse at measuring successful Holocaust memory interventions. This is exacerbated when we try and do this work in the digital. To give one example, when you look at the very few studies on the success of ar, that's augmented reality for Holocaust memory, the focus is always on efficacy.

And when you look at these studies in detail, they're interested in short term retainment of facts. What color was that diary is one example in one study. And long term memory is defined as a matter of weeks. Holocaust education and memory are long term qualitative experiences. We need to measure the long tail of the impact of initiatives.

So we really need to understand what really works in Holocaust education and memory digitally, non digitally and hybrid. There's a lot of talk about Holocaust education failing, but the truth is we can't say this for certain. But neither can we say that it's successful because we don't have the comparative long term impact measurement shared across institutions and projects for comparison. We also yet don't have measures that take into consideration what Stefania Manka has called our learning ecologies, which is increasingly including digital spaces. Recent studies in the UK and Switzerland demonstrate that social media and AI are are increasing as channels through which people are exposed to and often first learn or first encounter the Holocaust.

We can't think about what happens in a museum learning program, a virtual exhibition, a VR experience or a formal classroom in isolation. And this leads me to my first next step is we need to develop holistic impact analysis methodologies that can be shared across sites, across different kinds of projects and thinking about that long tail. The second then is the channels and actors that are today's memory makers are increasingly diverse and as are their motivations. So on one hand a new field of actors are the many third and fourth generation who are turning to their creative skills to connect with their grand and great grandparents stories. This might be on TikTok, it might be for computer games, it might be AR VR.

They have really good intentions and often great skill sets in digital media and don't necessarily have the Holocaust expertise behind their projects. At the other end of the scale we have so called bad actors who are either using sophisticated knowledge of data trends for politically driven disinformation campaigns or for commercial profit. And we've recently, I think all seen the news stories about the Auschwitz AI images and the kind of commercial models behind that. So a paradox for Holocaust education is that public awareness that this past happened and at least its basic facts is wide reaching, which is in today's world both its success and its failure. It's made it a ripe topic for commercial gain.

People want to talk about it, but worse, because people feel they know it, they feel they can engage in debates about it and which as people like to colloquially say, feeds the algorithm. And this isn't particularly new. We can see research all the way back to the 19th century about sensationalism selling in new sheets. Nevertheless, the diversity of actors has changed and the visibility of content is far more widespread. So our second next step would be we need platforms and other tech corporations to work with the Holocaust memory and education sectors consistently, globally and strategically, not just on short term campaigns or with the kind of policy makers and transnational organizations.

The third point I'd make on this is that Holocaust memory and education culture has a habit of simultaneously jumping on bandwagons and media panics. So the moment computer games are the bandwagon, lots of Holocaust museums we work with want to make a computer game, and Luke will remember the time when it was very much the opposite and AI is the current media panic. But much of the discourse about AI focuses on Holocaust sites and all of their materials as the authentic versus this new thing as artificial. But questions of representation and authenticity should be the forefront of all good critically engaged history, memory and cultural education about the Holocaust. Who created an image and for what purpose?

How is a survivor's testimony shaped by the institution and the practices behind its recording? Why might one survivor's testimony change in different formats over time? What curatorial choices are made in the way the Holocaust is presented or represented in any exhibition? So our third step is if we want to resist myths and disinformation, we should start by being transparent about the creation processes in our own education memorialization work and in the historical documents that we're looking at. Such an approach would open up visitors critical faculties, and there are really good examples of some of this work out there and offer a transparency that makes denial and distortion claims much harder to make.

Holocaust education should not simply be about protecting the facts as it's framed through the IRIS mission, but about critical engagement with sources historical and contemporary, which means historical and media literacies should be integral to it. Next slide please. So what I'm saying here are not just opinions plucked from the air, they're really grounded in the research that we've been doing in the lab. Don't worry too much about the details here, it's just an illustration. But one of the pieces of work we've been doing is recording walkthroughs of digital projects around the world.

And we've interviewed so far more than 100 front of house staff, curators, educators, programmers, creative and game designers, volunteers and survivors about their work in developing disseminating digital holocaust memory projects. This is work that is still ongoing and if you have been involved in project, please get in touch with us. We'd love to include you in our archive. Next slide. We also ran co creation workshops with tech and creative professionals, academics, heritage professionals and educators.

About 120150 people were involved in these. These different Projects. All of this work has been about listening exercises. What is it really like to be making this project? What are really the struggles that everyone is facing?

The next slide, please. And this was a report we did that was published by the United nations last year, which came out of a co creation workshop specifically with funders and policy makers. So it's recommendations for funders and policymakers, but actually came from them. And it was really refreshing to hear that the problems they could see were the same as what we were hearing in the museums as well. Next slide.

We've mapped to date 400 digital Holocaust projects across the world. And of course, this is ongoing as well. And then the next slide. And of course, as academics, we've read books, theorized and analyzed empirical case studies. And then the next slide as well.

So just some more examples. The next slide.

So our mission at the Landecker Digital Holocaust Memory Lab is to ensure the sustainability of Holocaust memory in the digital age. The next slide. These are the people we work with. Please, if you see yourself or feel yourself represented in that, get in touch with us. This is an invitation to be involved.

We see ourselves as a hub, as trying to bring everyone together who's interested in doing this work. We have various different kind of ways of doing this. We run regional design sprints, we run the expo that was already mentioned. We work directly with policymakers and consultancy on projects. We run the Digital Memory Dialogues, which currently has a series about AI in Holocaust memory.

Our last one was around computer games. And we run training and we do publications. But perhaps most significantly is our Digital Memory Database, which launches tomorrow, which is the platform where all of these interviews and the walkthroughs are coming together. Next slide. And play the video.

Holocaust Memory is at a turning point, shifting from a living memory to one that's increasingly digital. As this memory scape changes, who and what will be the memory makers of tomorrow? And how do we build on the past 30 years of digital practice, learning from what's already been done, preventing duplication, and safeguarding this heritage for the future. The Land Decker Digital Memory Lab exists to ensure the sustainability of Holocaust memory in the digital age. And in response to these challenges, it has built a world first, the Digital Memory database.

From the 1990s to today, it gathers digital projects, walkthroughs and interviews with the people who brought them to life. But it doesn't just record and archive what has been done. It connects it all into a living space designed with its users, tested with its communities, and built to grow, continually expanding as new projects emerge, enabling institutions from across the world to work together in sustaining Holocaust memory in the digital age, keeping it shared, not siloed, relevant, not obsolete, and safeguarding all this knowledge even when staff move on.

It is a place where heritage professionals can be inspired by past projects, connect with peers and share experiences to strengthen project proposals.

A platform where creative and technical experts explore how others navigate ethical challenges and can curate playlists of content to spark new ideas.

A library where researchers compare projects side by side, select excerpts from interviews and dive into data with interactive tools that. Reveal patterns across time and place. And a resource allowing funders and policymakers to see the bigger picture and view sector. Wide approaches to help them shape future strategies. Through the Digital Memory database.

The future of Holocaust memory will continue to be built, connected, collaborative and alive, ensuring it remains visible, accessible and sustained for generations to come. Be part of IT register at database.digitalmemorylab.com.

Thank you.

Thank you. You raised there the issue of ethics, which maybe we'll get back to, because there's a lot of questions around that in this discussion and in these topics. I'm going to move to a representative from Meta, David Tesler. I do want to say that we've been working with Meta for many years now on these issues, both on the policy side and kind of seeing what you know working on, what is Holocaust denial and distortion online, how it comes to play in the social media spaces, how you know, how can we adapt policies that actually mitigate Holocaust denial distortion on the platforms. And we've been really privileged to have a great relationship and it led to cooperation around Holocaust remembrance with redirection program that Meta started and then was followed by other platforms such as TikTok and hopefully others coming soon.

But really redirecting millions of people to about holocaust.org which is a website of WJC and UNESCO, another good partner of ours on these issues and bringing Holocaust education to really millions of people a year. So grateful for Meta for all of this and more to come. David Tesla is joining us. He's director of the Dangerous Organizations and Individuals team at Meta and maybe you can explain why that's relevant for this in the prevention space. David's team, along with hundreds of other experts at the company, work to stop terrorist, criminal and violent extremist groups that try to use the platforms.

Before Joining Meta in 2019, David served in the US Foreign Service and at the US Treasury Department for almost 20 years of public service. Among his assignments, David was stationed in Bucharest, Baghdad, and right here at the US Mission to the United nations, where he focused on countering terrorist financing and sanctions. He also grew up right outside of New York City, so welcome home for this and graduated with a Bachelor's from Washington University in St. Louis and a Master of Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School. So David, what role do platforms like Meta play today and how people learn about history? And what is the responsibility that you have on dealing with issues such as Holocaust denial, distortion and many the prevention of the spread of hate?

Thanks ifat and thank you Under Secretary General. As you all know, tomorrow is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It's an opportunity obviously to reflect on the horrors of the Holocaust and what happened to Jewish communities during World War II. It is also an opportunity to reflect on anti Jewish hate and Holocaust denial today and the threats that Jewish communities around the world face today. Since the October 7th terrorist attack, the world has seen a significant increase in anti Jewish hate.

And unfortunately the Bandai beach terrorist attack is a stark example of where that hate can lead. At Meda, with close to 4 billion users, we take our commitment very seriously to combat anti Jewish hate, to combat Holocaust denial. Where my team IFA to your question, dangerous organizations is umbrella term we use to cover the work we do countering terrorism, organized crime, but also violent extremist groups, including Nazi and neo Nazi groups, which is our link, our nexus to this work. In particular, IFAT mentioned that we've been collaborating with the World Jewish Congress now for years in a search redirect program that the Undersecretary General also mentioned. We are proud to be pioneers in this space.

The threats that are faced both offline and online are multifaceted and we think looking at it from a practical perspective, which is where I sit, trying to find practical solutions to mitigate these threats. We look both downstream at enforcement and also upstream at prevention. Downstream enforcement, you have to have the right policies in place. We ban Holocaust denial, those policies have to be in place, for example, and then you have to have the right enforcement to effectuate those policies. But looking only downstream at enforcement is not enough because this is, as I said, such a multifaceted problem.

So we have also been looking upstream at prevention and I think one of the earliest examples is the collaboration with the World Jewish Congress to develop this search redirect program. Searching for certain Holocaust related terms. A user will get an interstitial that pops up and be offered to be redirected off our platform to a site with educational material and resources to learn about the Holocaust. We do actually search redirect in a variety of different places in a variety of different contexts covering also counterterrorism in certain countries. It is not all users will click through.

But success here is not just the users that click through to see the additional resources and the educational material. Success is also showing a user or making a user stop for a second to think about what they're searching for and why they're searching. Success is also a user with mal intent to give that user notice that the meta platforms are not a friendly place for them to be searching for this type of material. So we are really proud of this collaboration. We also look at other upstream prevention type programs.

We have worked in the past with a Holocaust survivor who unfortunately is not able to be here today, but we're going to hear from a little bit later via video, Inge Auerbacher. We collaborated with her to develop in virtual reality an opportunity for people to interact with her and ask her questions about her experience. This type of immersive educational opportunity we think is really is really a chance to not only preserve her story or any Holocaust survivor story, which is in and of itself so important, but also an opportunity for a person who's interacting with Inga or with any Holocaust survivor in virtual reality to build a deeper connection, to build more empathy than just reading the story in kind of a. In a pamphlet or in a 2D situation. And then finally an ongoing project that we are super excited about.

I won't steal Luke's thunder because Luke is going to talk about it, I think, but we are collaborating with Luke on helping him or funding him to turn an amazing Holocaust education game from 2D into a virtual reality experience. Again, the same type of idea that giving a person the opportunity to experience this type of education in virtual reality is a whole new level of connection. That which we think going forward is just holds a ton of promise in terms of Holocaust education, but also in terms of preventing Holocaust denial and anti Jewish hate. I'll stop there.

Right. A lot of things to unpack, but I think the important one is just the step of the both taking responsibility as a platform for this content, but seeing it as part of prevention networks. Right. And it's very different when you see it just as an engagement or something content that you want to promote versus something that helps prevent then extremism prevents people going down that rabbit hole. And actually when you get that prompt, for example, on meta's platforms, it actually has a definition of the Holocaust that an expert, I won't expose his name, an expert on Holocaust education said that probably one of the best definitions of the Holocaust I've ever seen.

So putting that in front of the first result, especially when we know people are quick to scroll down, is really important. Luke has been mentioned here a few times already, but Luke Bernard is a video director and cultural change maker. He is the creator of the Light in the Darkness, the first narrative holocaust video game and the first Holocaust museum in Fortnite. His work uses immersive storytelling to educate millions globally, including in Arabic speaking regions based in la. He champions empathetic human centered storytelling.

And look, we've had this conversation many times before as well about where does the gaming space come? Why is it important to bring in this kind of content and education into the gaming space directly in different ways? So what brings you to do this and why do you see the importance of doing this in the gaming space? Is it working? Yes.

Oh.

That was great.

That was. Oh no.

Technology.

This is all sand, wasn't it?

So I would say they just showed a trail. Oh, oh no, it won't stop.

Okay.

It's still going on. It still like won't stop.

So. So I'd say they just showed the trailer of the new version of the game because. And then I go into it with new version of the game pretty much. Let's just show the trailer.

Exactly. Blossoms are a promise of new beginnings. No matter what happens, spring always comes. And with it, hope, My friend.

Listen, everything will be okay.

Okay, so why I wanted to show that first, pretty much because, you know, because when you hear the term video game, people who don't know about video games can imagine the worst. They can, you know, they can imagine it's either sim sitting a concentration camp or something like that. But. So why video games? Video games are the biggest part of the entertainment industry, period.

Bigger than music, movies and TV shows combined. Right. And if you look in the past, pretty much nothing actually in this list, you know, TV show, show, all those things, they were kind of the things that made the world know about the Holocaust. It was a cultural thing, it was film, all those things. That's what really changed everything.

And now it's video games that basically the biggest thing in the world. So it's very simple. Video games needed to address the Holocaust. It was kind of as easy as that. But as you guys can see, pretty much like, oh, don't, don't play this yet.

Don't play this yet. Because I'm not going into it yet. But basically, yeah, writing dynamics is a story. It's. And I would even argue because we released the first version 2023, this is the director's cut which is being funded by claims conference and also meta.

So it's going to have additional scenes. Going to be the original vision which I wanted to do because original one was self funded and I released it for free. And what was fascinating with that, games not only got everything right pretty much too because again a lot of people were concerned. They were like thinking with, you know, it would be a disaster. All those things, like everything historically was right.

It also had a huge emotional connection to people. I would even argue the way we did the story was more accurate than Hollywood because Hollywood tend to focus on survivors. We didn't. We focused on the truth which was most were murdered. They were.

And what we noticed even with the game, like the emotional impact which people are getting out of it. Like basically everyone who nearly plays the game at the end, they're in tears. We even see it in person at Gamescom everywhere. And we have $0 in marketing and pretty much it has. Over 2 million people have finished it so far.

3 finished keyword finished. Not just played, finished. So not just engagement, just like something like a video where someone just scrolls past it. They spent literally more than an hour pretty much to finish the game. So the average rate of completion of video games is around 10% width of 38%.

They showcase how much people want to finish it. Another interesting thing, one of our top player bases is Saudi Arabia. We translate it to Arabic. Another interesting thing too post October 7th. We haven't received the hate like everyone else.

Like people actually relate to the characters, actually get it. All those things. Like we have a lot of kind messages from Yemen, things like that where they're kind of like it's the first time we've seen about Jewish characters, all those things. And it showcases video games are the future of storytelling. They just are pretty much, you know, with the most influential thing.

So it showcases the positivity of what you can do when you actually make something correct. And it was interesting too because again the way we did it, like none of us were holocaust experts. All those things we did everything kind of on our own and you know, through just researching on websites all those things, we managed to make something that was really kind of accurate. And then because of this game now other games are being funded and all those things. So it's opened up the space.

I'd say now it's no longer fringe pretty much now it's more like, well why aren't you guys doing this? Pretty much. Because again, claims conference is behind it and they're Hindering room, too. They are. But, you know, so we have backing from basically, you know, and support from nearly all the biggest organizations within the space.

And so that thing there, pretty much that same year, so I saw actually a survey by the Claims Conference, and the survey was most Americans hadn't been to a Holocaust museum. So I was like, okay, I'll build one digitally. So I built one digitally in Fortnite. It's really that simple. It was.

I saw a problem. Not enough, because. Because, again, the Holocaust museums, people just can't access them. DC1 I bloody love. But, you know, most people can't go to dc.

So you're spending millions and millions of dollars in these brick and mortar museums, which most people can't go to. And then you're saying, you know, it's not reaching enough people. So we made a Holocaust museum inside Fortnite. We did. We worked very closely with Epic Games on it.

Epic Games were actually fantastic. They broke all the rules for us. You're not allowed to do things about genocide or put real photos inside Fortnite. And they basically broke the rules. They got their legal team involved, everything to make this happen.

And then I made that museum. And then I was kind of, you know, what, Play the video. And then I explain I will, but basically, I made it, and then I was kind of done. And then I'm basically passing off to the next generation. And I wait until.

Yeah, I know everyone's running around. That's what happens in video games. It is pretty much, yeah. And it was funny because, again, everyone saw everyone be offended because New York Times was like a spider man inside the Holocaust museum. And I was arguing, well, are you going to stop a kid from buying a Spider man T shirt in a real Holocaust museum?

No. So that's what I mean. There was. People thought there'd be outraged, but there was none. There wasn't.

So that's basically that thing there. And so basically, with this, since I was like, I made a museum now. So after we created the Anne Frank Young Voices program with Anne Frank la, and that basically is giving the students the ability to make their own Holocaust museums. Because I was like, I made one, so let's get more students to build their own things. That's another student museum, for example, because, again, you're looking at everything, social media, digital, those things, and we're constantly complaining, hey, we can't get enough people to pay attention to these things.

Let's just give it off to the youth, pretty much, so they can build those things. And what Was fascinating too. Yeah, that's the early version that we're testing out in the meta quest right now. So it's in VR on a flat screen. Doesn't look as good.

Just so everyone knows. Yeah, it looks like weird, but so pretty much with the Anne Frank Young Voices program, like we're passing off the torch counter next generation so they can build on Holocaust museums and kind of all those things. They can. And what's been fascinating with that program. So again, claims conf is going to be found.

They're also behind us with that Tuesday out. So we'll be very multiple pilots pretty much in Los Angeles school district this year, hoping pretty much next year to make it even bigger. Pretty much. But what's been fascinating with students because we let them kind of create their own thing. So it's like find a victim or survivor and kind of tell their story.

And after students feel like it's, you know, it's their thing. It is. So they're a lot more engaged because we've compared it. Compared. It's not to diss anyone.

We compared it to. Compared to more traditional methods where they're less engaged because again, they have to research these things, actually have to go on the right websites, find the right things and after push this out. So we're looking at it, you know, of course, within museums, within doing things in horizon worlds. We'll possibly also be teaching them how to possibly do things on social media. All those things.

Because one of my big things pretty much, again, like I brought up before Schindler's List and all those things, it was culture that made people actually care about the Holocaust. We've lost that because we're not doing video games. It shouldn't have taken pretty much someone like me just coming out randomly out of the blue, doing this thing, you know, and kind of disrupting the space. But now it's been disrupted, so now more people are doing it. But it's culturally it is.

And I think we need to pass it off also to the next generation too and not be too. Because before I remember, like sometimes at times some people get a bit scared of like, oh, we can't, you know, have students, not students, but kids. And I say try things about hog like video games, right? Like originally like Victor's, you know, mentioning a lot of people like, what the fuck are you guys doing? Pretty much a video game kind of thing.

So I kind of experienced that. I did that. I believe again, if someone has good intentions that kind of help them do those things. That's Come. I actually have a very positive outlook on all those things.

Well, I think it's really bad. Holocaust denial, those things. Like you can see social media, all those things. But there's a solution. There is.

Pretty much you work with the platforms because that's one big thing. Every company which I work with, from Epic to Meta, they're just looking for the solutions. You just like, oh, what's a cool product? Oh yeah, okay, let's work. Work with you on it.

Pretty much that's what I would encourage. Kind of research is nice, it's great. Complaining is nice too. But let's just build pretty much and kind of see what happens. Because right now what's happening is Neo Nazis are basically building and they're kind of putting all the information out.

So we just need to be doing kind of the same thing and giving out to the next generation.

Thank you. I like that sentence about culture was what made people care about the Holocaust. Right. And then my youngest son, he's very young, but he's obsessed with Avengers for a long time and so now he's watching. I'm not going to expose his age because it's inappropriate to watch this, but it's Captain the First Avengers.

And I was like kind of had it in the background. I was like doing stuff in the house no days and realize the whole story is about kind of World War II and the Holocaust and defeating the Nazis and everything. Like, wow, okay, my year old son is now exposed to this in this way. And what does that mean? Like how are we exposing them and how are we using this to, you know, to tell these stories to the future?

So there's also maybe one last thing which I wanted to say too is the guy who made video games was named Ralph Bayer and he escaped Nazi persecution and he was Jewish and I forgot to mention that. But basically someone who survived the Holocaust made video games.

With that we are going to watch a short video. Unfortunately, Inge Aberbucher, who is a 91 year old Holocaust survivor, couldn't make it here with us just for medical reasons today. But we did record her speaking. Inga, as was mentioned, was is a person featured in Tell Me Inga, a corporation that was started also with Meta and Storyfile, but with work here and work with Luke and others, is going to be transferred into Meta Quest and others. Right.

And so we just recorded her for a few minutes telling us about what's important for her in ensuring her testimony and story remains in the digital sphere.

My name is Inge Auerbacher. And I am a Holocaust survivor. I was born in a little village in southwestern Germany near the French and Swiss border. It was called Kippenheim.

And I spent three years in the Terezin Theresienstadt concentration camp. My first memories were when Kristen Light was. I was not even four years old. And my father and my grandfather went. To the synagogue in the morning to say their prayers.

Then the rumpus began. The police came into the house and. Arrested also my father. First my grandfather. He said his morning prayers.

In the morning. They both were taken to the first. Concentration camp in Germany, called Dachau. And then the rumpus began. They started marching through the little village.

I don't even know who they were. They said they were not from the village. Who knows? And they started to break the windows, throw in stones. We had a very large house, 18 rooms, and almost all the windows were broken.

And then we were hiding in a backyard shed to save our lives. I remember it very well, the broken. Glass all around us. We were standing first in our dining room, and these big brick stones were throwing in. One nearly hit me.

My mother just pushed me away. And this went on for almost a whole day. It was very scary for a child who was not even four years old. But I remember it as if it happened yesterday. I think it's very important for any generation, not only young children, to remember.

When people become very bad in a place where you have lived all your. Life and they can see movies about it, or maybe hear me speak. I speak all over the world, even. New Zealand, and to read books. I've written eight books in my life.

Three on my own story. Very important. But it's also very important to meet face to face some of these survivors who really lived it. And especially.

Young children who can meet. A survivor like me. I was their age. I never even was able to finish my first grade. School stopped because Jewish children were not.

Allowed to go to the schools where they lived. So I had to travel every day. Six years old, by myself, wearing the yellow star. I still have a star. If you want to see it, I have it.

And with the word Jude, honor, Jew. That was very humiliating for a little child walking around six years old. I only finished about six months of schooling. Schooling and education are so important. We are very fortunate today that we.

Have so many ways of teaching whatever we want. And especially also the Holocaust, obviously, because. We have this technology, wonderful technology, where. This can be shown face to face. So you cannot say this is all imagination.

Here you see the person speaking and telling the story. When they were young or children or adults. It makes it more palpable for everybody and especially children. Children are very nosy and they want. To see a real person.

You can see a real person this.

Yeah, it's very priceless to be hearing from Inge directly and hopefully we can work to maintain as much of this kind of testimony for the future. I'm moving now to the last person on our panel for today. Michal Serikaduri is the Executive Director of the Israel Growth Forum and Government relations manager@wix.com, michal is an ex diplomat and a human rights lawyer and working really at this intersection of technology policy and society. She co founded the high tech delegation to the March of the Living, linking global tech leaders to historical memory and social responsibility. So Michal, I think you bring a bit of a different view of a high level where you see from your work directly with technology leaders and the role of this tech sector more generally in connection with Holocaust making.

So tell us about your work in this wonderful.

Thank you ifa. So a real privilege to be here. And I do want to build on what my colleagues here have been discussing because I think we're giving a very multifaceted view of the role of technology and of alliances. And I think technology companies have that, that responsibility, as you mentioned Under Secretary, about ethics and truth and in terms of their internal policy and working together with policymakers, et cetera, and as well as platforms, of course, like David mentioned, as a big platform, the responsibility that you have and that you carry and the ability of what we can do with our products and our services, especially in the gaming world, like you demonstrated, Luke.

And I think that that's amazing what we've been kind of trying to do with the growth companies, which is a group of companies that came together about a year ago. And I'll share a little bit about the story of how it came about in a minute. But I think what we're trying to do is look at our assets not only in terms of the technology that we have and the platforms and the services, but also our assets in terms of our global reach. I mean, tech companies are really global creatures and our networks, business, financial, but also stakeholders, clients, talent is very global. Our leadership is cross country, very global in their mindset as well.

And again, it's all about people, our employees, our staff, very tech savvy, digital native, globally connected, virtual value driven. And what we've been trying to do in the past almost two years is leverage on that and kind of address the two Problems that were kind of underlining, I think, in every single person that has been speaking in the past 15 minutes. I think we've been kind of talking about truth, authenticity, education, you know, the data and everything that AI is, you know, presenting, et cetera, but also the emotional part, the connection.

Started talking about thinking about your grandfather and sobbing for two hours, hearing his voice. My choice of wearing a pearl necklace given to me by my grandmother, who is a Holocaust survivor. We have personal connection, emotional connection. And, David, you mentioned with Inga that you're trying to create that emotional connection, but it's very, very difficult on digital platforms to create a real emotional connection. So, you know, Inga mentioned that her story will stay there in two years, three years.

Will we believe it's true? Will we connect with it emotionally? So these are questions that we're trying to kind of grapple with as we move along. And what happened is that about two years ago, the CEO of the March of the Living movement and organization approached some of our forum members who are tech leaders, tech companies. And the initial thought was to approach them as philanthropists just seeking for funding for every Holocaust survivor who wanted to march in the March of the Living.

There aren't many left, and not all of them had the opportunity to march and have this closure. And her approach was, would you be happy to support us in bringing every survivor that wants to march to the march every year? What happened is that from that point on, that was kind of a hook to think about our greater responsibility and what can we do other than just be a philanthropic kind of arm to this? Can we play a different role? And what came from that is that we decided to take it one step further and create a relationship with the March of the Living and the Holocaust survivors.

So have our staff, together with the high tech delegation, with employees and management, not only employees and not only management, march shoulder to shoulder with the Holocaust survivors. So we do a prep before we leave, and then the Holocaust survivor delegation together, sponsored by the. By the tech company, but also marching shoulder to shoulder with them in the March of the Living. And what we are hoping that it does, and we already see the beginning of that happening, is that it creates a real kind of passing the baton, kind of carrying the torch, because they see, they feel, they connect very emotionally with the Holocaust survivors. And then again, I remind you, these are very tech savvy.

They go back to their positions, be it in any tech company out of the 25 that are a part of this program project. But the emotional connection is there. And it's real. And they're another living testimony of somebody that saw a real person, heard a real person, and, you know, and that hopefully will carry to, through their work and through their kind of the platforms that they touch. But also, like everything else with Holocaust education, of course, the next generation, their children, you know, et cetera.

And if. If we can kind of combine those assets generation to generation, hopefully we can, I think, tackle one of the most, I think, pressing and urgent problem. And I think if you have the video and you can play the first 45 seconds, I think, well, we didn't put the whole thing. Holocaust survivors are a rapidly diminishing group. We are in the last moments of.

Being able to share with our young. People our firsthand testimonies. Time is rapidly running out.

Each year sees smaller numbers of survivors able to accompany students on the March of the Living. Marching with students and survivors from many countries in those terrible places allows our students to learn and understand through stories and eyewitness accounts about our resilience, our. Strength and our determination. March from. You can.

So this is the beginning of a movie, of a short film that we did, we did a few others, trying to call more tech companies to join the tech delegation, because I think we're very used to the March of the Living Being addressing students and hall education in that sense. But we feel that there is a role for tech companies, employees, management, etc. To kind of amplify that with the digital tools, the services and their networks and connections. And this is what we're trying to do year by year. So we started last year was the first year with 11 companies and VCs.

And this year we're going to be over 25 and adding another kind of event to our calendar here in New York. So we started last year with the Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day and the March of the Living, which happens in April. And it was also 80 years for marking, commemorating the release of Brooklyn Auschwitz Baker. Now, this year, we're adding to the calendar of the delegation other events, including tomorrow, for the first time, we're doing a closing event at the New York Stock Exchange, ringing the bell, closing the trade with four Holocaust survivors on the balconies. So again, something that's.

We're trying to leverage all of our assets in a very untraditional way to kind of carry the torch in terms of content, but also in terms of responsibility. So I think with that, we're hoping to see more and more companies and more alliances and connections between NGOs and academia, tech companies, VCs, business leaders, et cetera. Thank you.

Thank you, Michal. Conscience of time. I feel like we just, we're going kind of in between, you know, sticking to our Holocaust survivors and people and testimonies and stories that we have, which we treasure and they're precious and kind of these other methods and mechanisms that we can use to maintain, you know, Holocaust memory and Holocaust education, be it gaming, be it museums, be it for our platforms. And a lot of ethical questions come in between these two. Right.

Like, and you mentioned this in the very beginning, even, even with a Holocaust testimony, like, what is. Is it 100% true? I mean, it's 100% their story. Is it 100% something that we. So I'm wondering if in a short minute, then I'll open up for audience for remarks and questions.

Any of you kind of face these ethical questions in this work and what are your thoughts about bringing this into the digital space? What should we be kind of looking at? Do you want to start, Ricky?

I think for me, that's why collaboration across sectors is so, so important. As I said earlier, there were so many people who want to use their creative skills to do this work. The work you're doing with tech people is fantastic, but we can't expect them to have, you know, 30, 40 years of Holocaust, you know, Holocaust studies or PhDs, and we don't. Not everyone needs to have a PhD in Holocaust. We need people to have skills in the tech stuff as well.

And I think that is the ethical issue, is why you need this working across the disciplines, the sectors, the nations. Otherwise the landscape we see of digital Holocaust memory just becomes incredibly fragmented. And there's the authority of Holocaust museums and the authority of those materials. And yes, there needs to be critical engagement with them. All of that stuff disappears if it only is then in the popular culture space.

So finding the way to build those collaborations for me is really, really fundamental to me, making sure the practice is ethical going forward.

The first thing that popped into my head when you were talking was AI, And I think that was going to fit. And I think generative AI holds a lot of promise and a lot of opportunity.

Folks can imagine with the size of Meta's platforms, the amount of content that we try to. We see every day. And trying to find and remove the Holocaust denial content is not easy because a lot of it is very nuanced and difficult. This is where I think that AI will be able to help us better catch the Holocaust denial content and remove it faster, which I think is key. But there's also risk, serious risk.

We have examples of this is not in the Holocaust denial space, but we have examples of terrorist groups, for example, generating terrorist attacks with AI that never occurred for use in propaganda, for example. So I think, you know, the space is still young and we're, you know, everyone is exploring both the opportunities and understanding the risks. I think that's going to be really crucial for us as we continue to figure out how best to use AI for good.

When we first launched Tell me Inga, there was a debate. Inga speaks English and German and there was a debate whether now that we have AI, can we just translate her testimony into any other language really easily. UNESCO, our partners, were very much actually, you know, keeping kind of track on whether this was going to be seen as Holocaust distortion stories like in all of this content.

These questions come in places that you don't really think about. Luke Good.

Yeah, you were talking about ethics. So I would say I think it's kind of more complicated and nuanced at times. Like if we discuss ethics, you know, memory, all those things like film have been allowed to do things about the Holocaust and it's never 100% accurate. Like in story can now be 100%. So I think same thing with a game and all those things.

But what I would say too in gals to because again, the space is very much being controlled by academia in general. It has and it's very not allowing lots of people to enter the space, which I think is a bit of a problem because then it doesn't allow more people to actually be able to create things around the Holocaust. But one thing again, which we noticed because the light in the darkness, right. We ended up like at the end with no researchers, kind of entire board. Everyone left while we were making the game pretty much.

But then Lexie, who's a writer like now's an expert on all those things. And it's actually because of the fantastic work which researchers have done and put up on websites like US Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem and all those things. And with the unfranched young voices. Right. Which I know could make a lot of people squirm.

It could. Because you know, we will have one educator, which is from Anne Frank LA, but we won't have any PhDs or people like that. Basically the students actually look up all the things via these websites. They do. Yad Vashem, US Holocaust Museum, all those things.

Well, I would say what we're missing is with academia, academia can't reach millions and millions of people, you know, individuals, but the websites can all those things. So what I would say more, what I encourage more, is pretty much for the academia to just put everything out on the Internet and then basically be able to let everyone kind of use it.

Sorry, now it's working. Yeah, just to build on that. I think that technologically, you know, we are worried about the fact that what's most available and most repeated and most cited and has the biggest exposure and data, et cetera, is what's going to be coming out of these LLMs and the AI. Because it's a matter of.

In many ways, it's a big numbers game. We see it with Wikipedia. We see that it's quite an open space for anybody to edit. And then you have a lot of the LLMs taking and shaping from Wikipedia and making that available. And so I think if I take what you've said, Vicky, about alliances and kind of what you've mentioned, Luke, about making the more reliable data that's out there that has been written and researched available, there's still that obstacle of will that disseminate in the LLMs.

Will it have enough exposure? Will it have enough repetitions so that it kicks, it catches and carries. And that's why we're looking at the scale as well, the people and you know, the many different companies, the many different people, a lot of alliances, also of people that have a lot of outreach and, you know, different platforms to create that scale to echo what the academia and those museums are going to be issuing out to kind of create that echoing effect.

I'm not going to expose, but there is an expert in the, in here working on Wikipedia and Holocaust. So if you want to say anything about the research, you're welcome to let me know. In the meantime, I'm opening. I have a lot more to talk about here, but I'm going to open it for questions or remarks here. Please go ahead.

Can you hear me? Okay, great. Hi, Lior Blick, I'm with Matrix Global System Integrator out of Israel, part of the founders of the, you know, this initiative with Michal's group. I wanted to talk about morality for a second versus ethics or the, what I would call an upper layer issues with AI and technology in general. I think, you know, we.

And I'll read a little bit and get off script for a second if you allow me for a few minutes. So never before has humanity possessed tools so capable of shaping societies, influencing behavior and determining outcome at scale. And never before a decision made in code and data sets carried such serious consequences for human dignity. Equality and freedom. Yet we continue to comfort ourselves with dangerous illusion that technology is neutral.

It is not. I stand before you not as a CEO, but as a person who has called the United States a home for about 30 years. My journey here has been one of hope, ambition and belief, of promise of this country, a place where diversity and innovation thrive. And yet I will share with you today. I brought my son that experienced a relatively traumatic experience with anti Semitism and social media back at what he used to call home in California.

That event actually drove us out of the state and made us go down to Florida and start a new life with four children. So I believe that as a leader in technology and business, myself and the group of the CEOs and many CEOs around the world, we have a responsibility to deploy tech with intention, ethics and empathy. We have to think about it. At the initiation stage. We spend very little time thinking about consequences of technology.

I implemented thousands of systems in health care, government, defense, and we spent very little time thinking what it's going to do. And there's real implication, real life implications in health care. We have done this. In 2008, we're putting Mrs. In and we're still taking care of those ramifications.

Many, many years later in the United States, so long before digital surveillance and AI, biometrics and databases, data already had power. In fact, it was one of the first time in history that modern technology mobilized to eliminate an entire people with industrial efficiency. Census records were repurposed to identify Jews, population registration, mapped families and communities. Punch card machines processed vast quantities of personal information and railroad schedules optimized deportation. In fact, the bureaucracy itself, the process of bureaucracy fragmented responsibility until no one felt accountable for the outcome.

Which is my concern with where we are now. The lesson is clear. When systems are misused, morality collapsed faster, farther and more complete than hatred alone ever could. In matrix. We're really proud to be in a project with Yad Vashem which is one of the largest Holocaust remember center in the world where we're really working on data and bi identifying trends around the world in downloading educational material.

The lack of by country as well of tracking the opposite movement of anti Semitic movement independently. And we're going to continue doing that very proudly in any way we can. We believe that antisemitism does not strengthen nations, it really hallows them. This institution, the United States nation, was founded because the world learned through catastrophes what happened when lost systems and technology advance faster than ethics and morality. Technology is never neutral and neither are we.

I Appreciate the time. Thank you for the attention on the matter, and we're going to continue supporting your movement, so appreciate it.

Thank you. That brings an idea of even what we think of regular technical tools. Right. And tech tools of databases and experience can be deployed in ways that can work on Holocaust memorial work with organizations and companies and museums to ensure how they kind of improve their work. I'm opening here, over.

Hello. Good afternoon. My name is Mihai Coco. I'm from the permanent nation of Romania to the un. I'd like to start by thanking all our wonderful panelists for the extremely valuable and insightful contributions today.

My question is also about technology and also, I believe I'm referring to our. Meta panelists as well. I did understand your upstream and downstream approaches to what I would essentially call misuses of technology. Could we look, however, is this something feasible or taken into account, to look at social networks in general, or meta in particular, in the promotion of tolerance, in the active promotion of narratives of tolerance and of critical thinking about history, in addition to responding to breaches, once they are being codified as such or once they have happened, are social networks able to actively contribute to implementing a curriculum for children in particular?

It's a good question. Thank you. So we have partnered with a variety of different educational institutions, specifically on youth safety issues. A whole variety of different youth safety issues. And so that's a place that I know off the top of my head, we've been quite active to your broader question.

You know, I don't know if we've done anything in that space, but it's a good thought and it's worth pursuing. Yeah.

I'll say thank you to the Permanent Mission of Romania and welcome because. Fairly new to the mission. Right. I had a question here. Go ahead.

Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Stefan Pretov. I'm the Deputy Permanent Representative of Austria here at the un. Thanks to all the panelists for really.

A very impressive presentation and very good discussion. I just wanted to share with you. That in Austria, we have very much. Prioritized the digital preservation of individual narratives through several key initiatives. So we have created a massive body of verified testimony, and the aim we have is now to make this accessible to the youth.

So there's a specific program for classrooms, and we also try to make all of this as interactive as possible in order to also attract the interest of. The younger generations listening to you and. All the possibilities of AI and new technologies. I had the question, with those data sets that are verified and by Holocaust witnesses, how could we use those data in order to scale up those national clean data sets to train AI models in order to proactively detect and debunk holocaust distortion in real time. The question is also what role the United nations and U.S. as member states could play in there.

But if there are any thoughts by any of the panelists on that would be very much appreciated.

Thank you, Vicky. I'll let you start on that one.

Thank you. It's a really good question and a really important one.

I think one of the themes that's been coming up in this panel and the conversation afterwards is how much of the digital work actually happens in the analog. It's human beings talking to each other. And we were talking about this at lunch today as well. You're saying people in tech industry is like the big tech. It's this evil image, but they're human beings.

And if you can get human beings to care about human beings and have conversations, you get things done. And honestly, trying to figure out things from a distance is somewhat pointless. With algorithmic things, they can just be changed by a company. But working with those companies head on, in partnership with each other is I think, the only way forward. And I think having that very careful consolation of policymakers, of people here at the un, people in the ira, of academics, of storytellers of the platforms and the other big tech companies, particularly creating Gen AI at the moment, but also future technologies as well.

Gen AI might not be with us in five, 10 years. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. The metaverse was going to change the world a few years ago, and now it's Gen AI. So we have these buzzwords of being careful, too much of that. But the companies are often similar and working with the human beings in those different fields together.

And strategically there's not enough digital strategy in Holocaust memory. And working at all those levels together, I think is the only way to be really clear that the stuff that you're producing and digitizing is actually being fed in the right way.

Listen, like AI, everyone talks about it right now, right? But all the stuff you see with generative, even AI, they've been generating worlds, all those things in video games for a while. AI isn't as impressive as what people think it is, pretty much. It's what I'm trying to say. It's also not a solution to everything too.

It isn't either. Like, like basically, let's say, imagine you can go to meta and be like, can you make an AI chat AI bot or something? They could have done that 10 years ago too. They don't need to do it now. It's just because everything is all that's what everyone talks about.

It's going to be a bubble, it's going to burst at one point. NFTs all those things. And also another thing which you wanted to point out too, which I think because I've heard a lot, we've talked in general a lot about survivors and survivor stories are important, but there were still 6 million that died. And their stories are important too, which I wanted to mention because I hear just a lot about survivors, their testimony which should be taken, but 6 million weren't able to. And you can still, which is tragic.

Holocaust survivors are dying. They're old. Right. And that's why we also do need to look at telling the stories of those that passed too that weren't able to continue telling their story. So that's just one thing.

On Holocaust denial, distortion and AI. And there's a follow up research coming up this year and I've been thinking about this a lot and I think one is yes, putting all that data into the Data sets for AI and LLMs is important. It's probably going to end up being just a drop in the huge ocean of data that feeds in. And so it's really important to work also on the other side of what the AI and chatbots, et cetera, are producing and making sure that, working with the companies, working with basically all the companies producing this and ensuring that they are verifying what's coming out on the other side, making sure that their resources that they're using are not necessarily Wikipedia on these sources, that they're using this data as well. So I think it can easily be a good cooperation on both ends of feeding that into it, but also making sure that those are the resources that are being used in the outputs.

If I can just add to that, I think if you're, it's what's the input, what the output, but also how it's consumed. So I think you were asking about governments and I've read recently my colleague sent me an article about the government of Finland, I think if I remember correctly, and a program that they're doing in terms of educating kids how to consume communication, how to read AI, how to know if it's true, not true, what to look for in content. So as the world changes and again it's people, people feeding it, people consuming it as well, reading it and using it. So can we look at the education system as well? And that end of the, you know, ifat you Were mentioning kind of the different steps.

At the end of the step, there's, how do we read it? How do we know what is true, what is not true? And that program, I think, is just the beginning. And I think we can look at the educational systems as very important vehicles as well. On that note, are you still interested in speaking?

Go ahead. I think you're set.

Yeah, just press the button. I just wanted to say that I agree with Luke that the AI is not the answer or solution to everything we have. It's very much inflated, like overinflated as. Something that's going to solve everything. Just like how the metaverse was overinflated as the world's next solution.

And now the metaverse is not very. It's very full of a bunch of. Just kids in their basements and they. Play their games and they have fun. You know, it's not the solution.

It's more of, like, where we can. Learn more and we could use it to learn more about new things. But I wouldn't suggest making it into something that creates laws or creates, like, data on itself because it's a little iffy with everything that wasn't for me. From somebody we were trying to reach. Young.

I see we're towards the end. I see Yonatan as well. Okay, free. And then we're finishing. Jonathan, thank you very much.

Just a quick question. I'm Jonathan from the Mission of Israel here at the UN to thank you. All for your very unique. And. It'S very interesting combining all the different perspectives together.

And I have a question, and I apologize. I'm someone who's never even seen a game of Fortnite. I apologize in advance, but in the context a lot of you have referred to the issue of education. And my question is, what do young. People today see as real?

You know, what makes it real? Are we trying to educate? Are we trying to get across information? Because they understand that Fortnite is not. A real game, but the information you're giving inside is real.

So I'd be very interested to hear the. You know, how you get across to the younger generation or how do they differentiate, or do they differentiate between what is real, what they're seeing on the screens? Is it the truth? So I think it's. You know, I'd be interested to hear your views on what.

What does a young person see as real or true, or how can he. What do they distinguish, knowing that Fortnite. Is not a real game. And in this context. Thank you.

Yeah, so it's actually a Very good question. So I don't really use the term education on any of my stuff because to me, pretty much what I've noticed, even students, right, they feel when you force it. Force them to learn something, they'd be like, I really don't want to learn this. You know, that's just the reality. And so in terms of video games, right, One thing we should notice, when people were playing Assassin's Crew, suddenly the students would pay more attention to those time periods and kind of like, say, Imagine once has Creed set in Egypt, they pay more attention in class.

So for Light and Darkness, for example, the game which I showed, it's very. It's like an animated film, but in between scenes, I pretty much show, like, real photos, show real footage, all things like that. So that's kind of how I do it. And with Fortnite, it's kind of the same thing. Fortnite, what I did was just basically just do like.

Like a real Holocaust museum, only it's inside. Fortnite. It is. But I would say also another interesting thing, too, because you mentioned young people's average age of a gamer is 35. It is.

It's. It's pretty much. Let's put it this way, playing video games now is. Is as normal. Yep.

Playing video games now is as normal as reading a book and watching a movie. It is. That's why I tell. People don't understand that. I'm like, what are you doing?

Nothing about entertainment then. But no, I would say the viewer, as in general, you can with everything, Right. Stories are what shapes the world. Pretty much. It is.

It's not even about things being real or not real, although things, of course, we show that it's real and it all happened. Right. But it's very much how you connect to people on an emotional level, how you can tell the story. It is. And that's why I don't.

I find that I don't view social media as a solution towards Holocaust education one bit because it's. It's too quick. It's boom, you know, just go on to the next thing. But what's interesting in video games, right, compared to social media, is that people, when they play a video game, even the young ones and on their phone, they just focus on the screen. So it allows people to just be more immersed.

But in terms of. Yeah, people disconnecting what's real or not. I mean, Fortnite has the real photos up or those things, but I would argue that's upon which I'm actually. I don't like AI one bit. I don't, I actually will even argue this.

I don't want Holocaust education touch AI. I don't want it anywhere near it. I don't control things. And the reason why is because AI's gotten so good where the photos can be completely, you know, I mean we've seen it with the Holocaust photos which is happening on YouTube. It is pretty much kind of non stop.

So what I do think will happen within a decade from now, most people won't be able to tell what the reality from. And it's not because of video games, it's because of generative AI. It is, that's just a reality. So we're trying to look. I don't understand why people try to look at AI as being like this is a solution.

No, AI is creating the problem, but it's also creating solutions for some as a great things. But it's creating a big problem for the Holocaust space. It is. So that's why. And also now seeing with the LLMs like you know, you have to go up to Sam Altman and like open AI, it will, it's up to convincing them like even no matter how much content we put up.

So that's how come I view it more like what I think in terms of things being real is, you know, just continue to put things out about Holocaust actually did happen here onto photos or things like that. But video games are what touches people more. People pay more attention to it. It's a cultural thing. It is a lot more.

So that's why, that's why I like video games because people actually pay attention. It's kind of like how film used to be, you know. Now Netflix, if you announced where they're like we have to make our films really bad because people on their phones. But video games are kind of like you're paying attention just to that kind of old school movies. Yeah, I think I went off on the rant.

Thank you. At the end I'm going to take advantage of my role. Ricky, are you okay? So I'm going to ask actually your name is Robert Ricky here to talk a bit maybe on Wikipedia and Holocaust denial for a moment and then we'll have closing remarks.

Yeah, thank you so much. Ifat I guess I'll go a little bit more general but I'll touch on wiki. So I work with a new organization called Data Nation. We focus on detecting misinformation bias, radicalizing content, anything from social platforms to information platforms like Wikipedia and finding the downstream effects that those have. Whether it's on LLMs or in education spaces or anywhere where people consume information.

It's vital that tech companies at this point largely, you know, AI companies in the areas I focus from Meta to OpenAI and Google, that they fundamentally rethink what they consider reliable data. And this is most critical when it comes to factual claims about sensitive issues and history such as the Holocaust. You know, data poisoning is a concept that's existed in information and in similar spaces for a long time. It's done by many people, it's done intentionally by state and non state bad actors as well as unintentionally by people who are using Instagram to post ideas. And ultimately that information ends up being consumed as factual claims as opposed to opinions.

The reliance of LLM companies on real time user generated data from Reddit to Wikipedia and Quora and other platforms, it's a fundamental vulnerability in LLMs and AI tools. It's essential to utilize social platforms and information platforms like Wikipedia, of course, because it makes the chatbots more personable and makes them engaging and that's of course essential to their use. But we need to differentiate between general and sensitive topics at the very least. And there's also just fundamental shifts that need to go beyond that. You know, AI systems, AI chatbots, they're the textbooks of tomorrow.

That's something that I think is really important to see. You know, everyone's children are, they're using these in classrooms, the teachers are using them to create curriculum. It's inevitable that these use cases are going to be there. So we can't ignore them. We can't say we will not touch this information and the information generated through generative AI, because it's going to happen whether you want it to or not.

So I think it's essential that we make these key decisions on these impacts and how to mitigate negative impacts together, not unilaterally on the company level. This needs to happen internationally, nationally, locally, on every level. And we really can't wait until these issues are baked in to the information that we consume. Because at this point now, AI is consuming AI generated content and that creates its own conundrums. So of course, if anyone on the panel is interested in commenting, you know, David or anyone else, that would be excellent.

Thank you. Some of the work you do is also like looking at not just LM stuff, but even the amount of websites out there that have like, you know, very inaccurate information, if not false disinformation. And that also is just created to feed into systems, educational systems. So even just detecting that is done by a lot of tech tools that you're working on. We could go on for a long time normally in the UN because it's so full then people kick you out at time, but I guess today is quite so thank you for staying with us.

I mentioned a few times UNESCO have been partnering with us for many years as a UN organization mandated for Holocaust education as well. So Tim Francis, happy to have some closing remarks from you on behalf of UNESCO.

Thank you very much, Excellencies, ladies and. Gentlemen, Under Secretary General Fleming. Dear panelists, thank you for your very.

Interesting and very practical discussions, and we welcome seeing many of our closest partners among you working on this topic. As we bring today's discussion to a. Close, we're reminded that the Holocaust remains an indelible scar on the fabric of human history, a stark warning of how far humanity can fall when hatred goes unchecked. Yet disturbingly, there are those who seek. To deny or distort this dark chapter.

As highlighted in the educational materials developed by UNESCO and reflected in the digital. Projects explored today, social media has become a key battleground. UN and UNESCO research finds that nearly one in five social media posts about the Holocaust deny or distort its facts. When such content is liked, shared or replicated, it normalizes disinformation and erodes our. Shared understanding of truth.

This erosion is not abstract. Online anti Semitism has real world consequences. With UNESCO research to be launched tomorrow. On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, finding significant. Proportions of surveyed teachers in Europe encountering.

Holocaust denial and distortion among their students. We must employ education, empathy and irrefutable. Historical evidence to fortify young people against. The normalization of Nazi ideologies. This is why UNESCO has partnered with the World Jewish Congress and platforms like TikTok and Meta to combat Holocaust denial.

By redirecting you by redirecting users searching. For related terms to official sources, as many of you highlighted in your interventions as well. So that began in 2022 and it. Uses in app banners to provide verified educational information addressing the rise of distortion and misinformation online. And in the Same vein, since 2023, UNESCO has trained over 1300 teachers and.

Policymakers on countering antisemitism, and we have. Developed specific resources to support and guide. Teachers and journalists to counter denial and distortion. And tomorrow UNESCO and the SDG Academy will launch a new online course to. Strengthen teaching and learning about violent pasts including the Holocaust.

But we also face new ethical dilemmas. UNESCO's new report again with the World Jewish Congress Rewriting History, which is coming out which just came out. And you can find it online if you search. Rewriting history finds that AI can oversimplify or appropriate or even invent Holocaust experiences. Without historical grounding or moral responsibility.

So thanks to this very strong partnership, we're embarking on a new joint research. I think you mentioned this briefly, to better understand the amount of AI generated. Content on the Holocaust that surfaces online. What we choose to teach, to challenge and to correct will shape how future. Generations understand not only the Holocaust, but.

The value of truth itself. So as we conclude, the task is. Clear to ensure that remembrance remains grounded in history, guided by responsibility and responsive. To the realities of the digital age. Thank you.

Thank you for also bringing back the, you know, we're not just teaching Holocaust for the sake of the past, but for the future of our generations and prevention in the future. We're going to end here. Thank you, Under Secretary General. Especially thank you to your team. Tracy is behind here.

Tracy, Mikol Boli, We've been outstanding in hard circumstances and you have a very long week still ahead tomorrow, Nell, so good luck with that. Thank you for accommodating this. On behalf of the World Jewish Congress Institute for Technology and Human Rights, thank you for your commitment to safeguarding Holocaust memory. Thank you for joining us today. I wish you a meaningful international Holocaust Remembrance Day and all your activities and be in touch.

Thank you. Thank you.