Pawel Sawicki, 39, has been spearheading the Auschwitz Memorial's social media since 2009.

In addition to tweeting individual stories about Auschwitz to raise awareness, Sawicki has used Twitter to fact-check various media outlets and users.

As Twitter struggles to combat misinformation, he has used the institution's account to fight back against fringe conspiracy theories.

Sawicki's goal isn't to persuade Holocaust deniers or conspiracy theorists. Rather, he wants to reach people who are susceptible to misinformation.

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On December 24, the far-right conspiracy theorist Dinesh D'Souza used Twitter to chime in on the latest Rudy Giuliani controversy to his over 1 million followers, commenting that President Donald Trump's personal lawyer was "more of a Jew" than the Hungarian billionaire George Soros.

While a tweet by CNN had described Soros as a Holocaust survivor, D'Souza had a different understanding: "Holocaust survivor? Ho, ho, ho. By his own admission, young Soros assisted in the confiscation of Jewish property on behalf of a Hungarian regime loyal to the Nazis." That post, and the misinformation within it, has more than 6,906 retweets and 757 replies.

Though many users expressed outrage at D'Souza for spreading a lie, others agreed or shared a photo purporting to show Soros as a Nazi SS officer (the picture actually shows Oskar Gröning, an SS member stationed at Auschwitz).

Eight hours after D'Souza's tweet, the Auschwitz Memorial's Twitter account replied with two pages of copy dispelling frequently circulated rumors that Soros, now 89, was a Nazi collaborator. The account quickly responded to a user accusing the museum of defending "liberals," saying: "For us everything that is true, is right. Everything that is a lie or manipulation, is wrong and false. The truth & the facts about complicated and difficult history is exactly what we are teaching."

Tweets like these offer a bleak microcosm of the internet — a charlatan with a large platform disseminates a harmful rumor and then an authoritative voice of reason steps in, asking users to side with the truth. Unlike many social-media accounts commemorating the Holocaust, the Auschwitz Memorial's Twitter account has assumed the role of a fact-checker. But unlike many fact-checkers, the account conducts its work in full view of the public, as loudly as possible.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest extermination center of the Holocaust, the Nazi regime's systemic, genocidal murder of an estimated 6 million Jews from 1941 to 1945. From its conversion to a death camp in 1942 to the liberation of its prisoners in 1945, 1.1 million victims were murdered in Auschwitz.

In addition to highlighting stories about Auschwitz survivors and victims, the Twitter account often corrects or adds context to newspapers, journalists, and prominent figures like D'Souza about everything from outlandish claims to simple errors regarding historical dates and events. Despite shooting out dozens of posts a day, the account is run by just one person, Pawel Sawicki.

At first, Auschwitz didn't know how people would react to the topic of genocide on social media

Pawel Sawicki runs the Twitter account for the Auschwitz Memorial. Paul Sawicki

Sawicki, 39, told Insider the museum's social-media presence was part of its broader efforts to honor the legacy of the death camp's victims. "Part of our mission is to preserve the history of this place," he said. "So, facts are very important."

Sawicki, a former journalist, was initially drawn to studying Auschwitz through family history. After World War II, his grandparents moved to Oswiecim, Poland, the town where the Auschwitz Memorial is located. As a journalist, Sawicki established a professional rapport with the museum and explored his interests in learning the history of the Holocaust. He was later offered the role of a press officer in the fall of 2007. Five years ago, he also began working as a tour guide.

In 2009, the memorial ventured into the world of social media when it created a Facebook page. At first, his team was worried about how users would react to seeing posts commemorating a genocide sandwiched between "music videos" and "birthday wishes" as they scrolled. The team was surprised to find that people saw its social accounts "as an extension of the mission that we do in the historical sites." Three years later, in 2012, Sawicki launched the Twitter account that's now garnered nearly 1 million followers.

Compared with Facebook, Twitter offered more interactive opportunities for the museum. From the get-go, fact-checking was part of its Twitter strategy. Searching for hashtags and key search terms like "the Holocaust" and "Auschwitz," Sawicki says, he and his team can monitor conversations that are developing online.

For his fact-checking, Sawicki draws from Auschwitz's archive and occasionally asks for assistance from the institution's historians. As fact-checking takes place on Twitter, users are offered a glimpse into the correction process that traditionally has taken place over phone or email.

On January 2, Sawicki reached out to Renee Ghert-Zand regarding her article in The Times of Israel about Heather Dune MacAdam's book "999: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Jewish Transport to Auschwitz." Sawicki took issue with the article's original title, "The first Auschwitz transport was of 997 young Slovakian Jewish women and teens," because Auschwitz I was established in 1940 for Polish political prisoners — it expanded as a concentration camp for Jews in 1942.

After some back-and-forth on Twitter, correcting the title twice, Amanda Borschel-Dan, an editor at The Times of Israel, changed the article's title to "First transport of Jews to Auschwitz was 997 young Slovak women and teens." Reflecting on the exchange with the museum, Borschel-Dan said in an email: "There is no conflict when we are publicly fact-checked [by the museum] since our goals are the same — factual accuracy and nuance when reporting on the Holocaust. Our points of view may slightly differ, but our aims are the same." She expressed concerns over being corrected in "a public manner," however, saying it "inevitably generates a troll tweetstorm."

Sawicki said he wasn't concerned with trolls because he considered them inevitable and couldn't let it interfere with his trying to educate people about Auschwitz. "They shouldn't control the way we work and the way we act," he said. For the former journalist, fact-checking publicly is a matter of efficiency. Instead of trying to find an email or phone number to contact, he's able to get quicker responses — and corrections — from outlets by engaging on Twitter.

Not everyone takes kindly to Sawicki's fact-checking process

Sawicki acknowledged to Insider that even though most of his fact-checking interactions were cordial, sometimes he had to block users. Last February, in an opinion piece for Haaretz, the journalist Ariel Sobel detailed her hostile exchange with the account that led to her getting blocked (Sobel has faced allegations about her credibility in the past). The exchange began when the museum criticized article in The Jewish Voice titled "Auschwitz-Birkenau & Its Polish Roots."

Sawicki tweeted: "The title is not only false & ahistorical. It's disrespectful to the memory of all the victims of Auschwitz: Jews, Poles, Roma, Soviets & others. Zero arguments show the dangerous bias & manipulative character of this editorial. Shame." In a tweet, Sobel then accused the account of trying to "rewrite history" by erasing "Polish antisemitism."

Responding to her jab, Sawicki said there were "no 'Polish roots' within the history of Auschwitz." In her scathing article, Sobel contextualized the tweet — and the museum's fact-checking efforts — with 2018 legislation signed into law by Poland's right-wing president, Andrzej Duda, that criminalized tying Poles to Nazi crimes. The law triggered an international backlash, and though it was adjusted in June 2018, the Polish government continues to have a tense relationship with Israel regarding the legacy of the Holocaust.

The Germans were responsible for the construction and administration of the Auschwitz concentration-camp network while they were occupying Poland during World War II. But Sobel's qualms touched upon something broader: non-Jewish Poles helping Nazis locate Jewish Poles as well as anti-Semitism preceding the Holocaust.

In an email response to Insider about Sobel's claims, Sawicki took issue with Sobel's credibility and said: "Our position is very clear: the acts of Poles — heroic or horrifying — within the context of German occupation of Poland must be researched honestly, fairly and professionally."

Additionally, Sawicki told Insider that the notion of "Polish complicity" in Auschwitz was "simply false." Sobel's qualms, however, were less about the specificities of Auschwitz's history and more about addressing the environment in which antisemitism fostered. As Rivka Weinberg, a philosophy professor at Scripps College, noted in a recent New York Times op-ed article, European countries with a richer history in antisemitism, like Poland, had populations that were more complicit in helping Nazis locate Jews.

Regardless, debates over complicity have a geopolitical subtext. In December, Russian President Vladimir Putin made controversial comments blaming Poland for the start of World War II. On January 14, a Twitter account representing the State Duma, a Russian legislative branch, posted a tweet demanding that the Polish government apologize for "extermination camps." Sawicki responded with a quote-tweet that advocated education about the concentration camp's "complicated history."

These discussions about the veracity of historical details can rapidly go off the rails and can be hard to follow and respond to given that Sawicki frequently doesn't use citations in his corrections. On December 30, the account publicly disputed an article in Haaretz: "Your general article about the history of #Auschwitz does not mention Poles who were the first group of victims & for whom the German Nazis established the camp. Below you will find some other factual clarification of the text." (Haaretz didn't issue a response or a correction to its article, and a Haaretz reporter whose beat is Poland and the Holocaust declined to comment.) In the responses to the tweet, some users engaged in a rather toxic discussion about the contested notion of Polish complicity in the Holocaust.

The former journalist said his goal wasn't to persuade Holocaust deniers or conspiracy theorists who were motivated by antisemitic bigotry but rather to "give information, knowledge, resources to those people who are exposed to such lies."

In an email to Insider, Dr. Torsten Kathke, a history professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University's Obama Institute whose expertise is combating "false narratives," said that fact-checking on social media was important because it's intended not for "the person who is lying, but at those who might have cause to believe the lie."

He stressed that though he understood concerns about platforming "fringe ideas" through engaging with them, it's critical to get the truth out when a social-media account with thousands or millions of followers is spreading bigoted rumors. Kathke is skeptical about whether Twitter is grasping the severity of the issue and cited concerns that the new feature to stop replies on tweets would make it more difficult for users to "unmask lies."

A representative for Twitter told Insider that D'Souza's false tweets about Soros didn't violate the platform's rules. In a statement addressing a question about what actions Twitter was taking to fact-check misinformation about the Holocaust, the representative said: "As outlined in the Twitter Rules, we do not tolerate targeted instances of hateful conduct, including making references to violent events or types of violence where protected categories were the primary victims, or attempts to deny or diminish such events."

Therefore, while glorifying or denying the Holocaust is a violation of the platform's rules, spreading misinformation about who was a victim or perpetrator, as in the case of D'Souza's lies about Soros, requires independent fact-checkers to step in and tell the general public what's correct. Despite the implicit credibility of representing a globally renowned institution, Sawicki can do only so much with one account. It's the social networks themselves that must figure out how to balance promoting freedom of discussion with helping to proliferate misinformation.

As the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz approaches, Sawicki is interacting with prominent figures on Twitter in hopes of reaching 1 million followers. He's taken on a righteous mission of trying to educate as many users as possible about one of the 20th century's worst tragedies. This task, at times, has been interpreted pretty broadly — he frequently reminds users of the historical inaccuracies in works of fiction like Heather Morris' "The Tattooist of Auschwitz" and John Boyne's "The Boy In The Striped Pajamas."

Sawicki stressed that most of his interactions on Twitter were positive, citing a user who compared his account to a virtual vigil for Auschwitz victims. Though these historical discussions are increasingly taking place on social media, he recommends for people to get more information from other resources like going to a local museum or booking a virtual tour of the Auschwitz Memorial. He remarked, "The knowledge is online, it's simply a question of choosing to learn."