AI-Generated Holocaust “Slop” on Facebook

September 3, 2025

The rise of generative AI has created a new layer of information disorder. Where misinformation once required effort — fabrication, editing, coordination — now it can be produced at scale, cheaply and endlessly. Low-quality synthetic material, dubbed “AI slop,” floods social media platforms daily, not primarily to mislead politically but to monetize attention. It exploits algorithms designed to reward engagement, overwhelming audiences with a torrent of emotionally charged images and text.

This economy of synthetic content has already shown itself in fake celebrity deaths, fabricated war images, and bogus disaster photos designed to harvest clicks. But when it turns to history, the consequences reach further than simple deception. Historical memory, particularly around atrocities, is fragile. Survivors and educators spend decades building trust in authentic testimony and documentation. AI slop threatens to erode that trust, reducing the weight of history to just another engagement tactic.

The Holocaust has become a prime target in this new cycle of exploitation. It is globally recognized, emotionally charged, and rich in symbolic imagery — making it an ideal subject for spam networks seeking traffic. What follows is not an ideological campaign of denial but a commercialization of remembrance, where fabricated victims and distorted camp scenes are fed into Meta’s monetization system. The result is a dangerous trivialization of the past at the very moment when living witnesses are disappearing.

The flood of AI-generated content is now touching one of the most sensitive areas of historical memory: the Holocaust. A BBC investigation revealed an international spam network, largely based in Pakistan but stretching into India, Vietnam, Thailand, and Nigeria, producing fabricated Holocaust images and stories with AI tools, then pushing them into Facebook’s algorithmic bloodstream. The aim is not ideological but financial. The spammers are exploiting Meta’s content monetization program, which pays users for high-engagement content. For them, history has become a resource to be mined — fake camp photos, invented survivor tales, distorted scenes of children hiding under floorboards or babies abandoned on train tracks — all designed to trigger clicks, likes, and shares.

Holocaust organizations and survivors have reacted with alarm. The Auschwitz Memorial in Poland described the phenomenon as a “strange emotional game” turning atrocity into entertainment. The museum has tracked hundreds of these fake images circulating under names like “Timeless Tales” and “History Haven,” pages posting more than fifty times a day, often stealing and manipulating genuine memorial content. Survivors are confused and disturbed, seeing supposed photographs of events they lived through but never witnessed. Some now question whether their decades of testimony and educational work have been in vain, as AI slop floods timelines faster than authentic memory can defend itself.

One figure, Abdul Mughees from Pakistan, illustrates how the system is gamed. His Facebook account, boasting over a billion views in just four months, claimed earnings of $20,000 through monetized traffic. Though the numbers remain unverified, the pattern is clear: step-by-step instructional videos circulate among content creators, teaching how to prompt AI to generate fake historical imagery, how to mimic the voices of memorial institutions, and how to tailor content toward Western audiences whose views are worth eight times more in ad revenue than those from Asia. In this economy of false memory, Auschwitz becomes a keyword, a traffic magnet, and a profitable niche.

Meta has acted against some of these pages — not for Holocaust fakery itself, but for “inauthentic behavior,” impersonation of legitimate groups, or trading accounts on the gray market. Yet its underlying business model remains the accelerator. Holocaust imagery is not the only “content vertical” being spammed: anything that reliably provokes emotion, from natural disasters to celebrity deaths, is fair game for these factories of AI slop. What is unique in the Holocaust case is the weight of memory being manipulated — one of the most documented and symbolically charged crimes in human history reduced to a viral click machine.

The danger goes beyond disrespect. Scholars warn that the endless stream of distorted AI Holocaust content risks feeding a perception that the entire historical record is itself artificial. If survivors see their real photographs dismissed as AI, or if younger audiences encounter fake imagery first, Holocaust education risks collapsing into doubt. With the last survivors nearing the end of their lives, this flood of synthetic memory arrives at a particularly fragile moment.

The broader picture is an emerging economy of synthetic history. Networks of creators are churning out fake images of wars, disasters, and atrocities not to revise history consciously, but to commodify it. For them, Auschwitz is no different than a trending meme template. Yet in the noise generated by their output, the line between real and fabricated memory becomes blurred — and that confusion may outlive the spammers themselves.