Canadian Jewish News June 5, 2026
The Toronto Holocaust Museum has started testing an experimental advertising campaign to combat harmful content online.
On May 12, the museum launched a YouTube account called “Hate Tags”, whose videos are run as short paid advertisements before content flagged as hateful, misinformation, or incitement of violence. The five-second advertisements show a bright red warning sign beside graphic scenes, such as a school shooter walking through a hallway or a building with a Star of David and broken windows, before warning the viewer: “Think before you watch.”
Dara Solomon, the executive director of the Toronto Holocaust Museum, says the advertisements were made to fulfill the same role as warning labels on cigarette cartons, but for “addictive” social media content.
“The videos, if you watch them, they really do stop you in your tracks,” says Solomon, adding that she thinks cigarette cartons’ warnings “only worked when you saw those infected lungs and those really graphic images.”
Solomon hopes the initiative will encourage social media platforms to start labelling content that promotes violence, and convince the federal government to clearly define hate speech and misinformation. The museum launched a Change.org petition to this effect that collected around 1,300 signatures by the start of June.
Hate Tags is also their attempt to connect with 18-to-24-year-olds who Solomon says attend the museum less frequently than grade schoolers. Since the Holocaust and Nazi propaganda are “rooted in misinformation that spurned so much hate,” she felt they were well equipped to warn young adults about the harms of antisemitism and broader hateful content alike.
“We decided we needed to go beyond the museum’s walls to engage that group in a very direct, powerful way, and to meet them where they are, which is online,” Solomon says.
The seven Hate Tags advertisements have reached around 1.78 million views on YouTube by the time of writing. Solomon says they’re “on track to reach more than seven million by the end of the campaign, with the recent expansion across Canada.”
This isn’t the Toronto Holocaust Museum’s first online initiative about social media misinformation. In 2024, the organization got a $375,000 grant from the Ministry of Heritage to share advice on how to spot misinformation and where to find verified sources of news.
Solomon says that first campaign ran from January to March 2025, drew more than three million impressions, and allowed the museum to refine its social media techniques for the Hate Tags campaign, which was funded by the same grant as a second phase.
“We just wanted people to think about their online consumption. One of the posts said, ‘Your aunt Sheila is not a verified news source,’ so (we were) a little cheeky like that,” Solomon says.
Unlike the first campaign, which the Toronto Holocaust Museum spread naturally through its online networks, Solomon says they partnered with advertising firm Diamond and media agency Epitaph to make sure Hate Tags were placed on hateful videos across the political spectrum.
This included content that was “clear-cut” in its hatred, such as “homophobic, anti-immigrant” right-wing videos by manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate, and less obvious discussions in left-wing academic circles.
“We can’t just go after the hate on the right. We have to go after the hate on the left, too, and it’s so nuanced,” Solomon says. “The Holocaust denial that you see that’s coming from an academic lens, the kinds of things you’re seeing coming out of campuses, I would say that’s some of the hate on the left. And Holocaust minimization.”
Jordan Cohen and Mark Holden, the creative directors at Diamond responsible for the Hate Tags advertising campaign, say they “reverse engineered” the AI-powered software Silverpush that “brands use to protect themselves from appearing next to objectionable content.”
“Instead of avoiding hate, we were hunting for it. The ads were contextually targeted based on visuals, audio, copy, comments, and hashtags across a range of hate and misinformation categories,” Cohen and Holden wrote in an email statement.
The Diamond team used keywords like “demographic replacement” and “white extinction” to target videos that discuss the Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory that suggests immigrants are intentionally replacing white populations in Europe and North America. Cohen and Holden say they also targeted “terms that funnel young men toward increasingly extreme worldviews” and misogyny, such as “incel, red pill, alpha male, and female hypergamy.”
Jaimie Weisberg is a lifestyle influencer who talks about body positivity and shares optimistic stories about Jewish life to her more than 1.7 million social media followers. Weisberg collaborated with the Toronto Holocaust Museum to post promotional content about the Hate Tags initiative on Tiktok.
She says she supports the museum’s campaign to curb online hate speech because she’s been threatened and harassed for “simply existing” in a bigger body, and for being Jewish online.
“As someone who’s dealt with hundreds of thousands of people when my videos get on the wrong side of the internet, it can get very scary, and it really has taken a toll on my mental health at times. With regulations, it will help us keep everybody safer,” Weisberg says. “There need to be consequences for people who commit crimes like bullying and harassment and doxxing.”
The government is ‘dragging its feet’
Angus Lockhart is a senior policy analyst at Dais, a public policy think tank at Toronto Metropolitan University that conducts annual surveys tracking how often Canadians see harmful online content.
He says the Hate Tags initiative “sounds like a really interesting way of actually doing something” about misinformation and hate speech at a time when “the government is dragging its feet on the issue” of hateful content, despite overwhelming approval from Canadians.
“They don’t trust the platforms to solve it themselves, and so government needs to step in. Government isn’t stepping in, so finding a solution like that, that might actually help does seem at least worth the effort,” Lockhart says.
Lockhart says misinformation, hate speech, and incitement of violence have all become more common online since Dais started its surveys in 2019. He says more than two thirds of surveyed Canadians have agreed every year that the government should intervene in social media moderation, even if it means limiting freedom of expression.
“What we asked is, ‘Should platforms be required to quickly remove hate speech that deliberately promotes hate against an identifiable group?’ and that had 81 percent support,” Lockhart says of the 2025 survey. “A strong support for actually going a step further than just labelling it.”
By comparison, 78 per cent of surveyed Canadians in 2025 agreed that independent fact checkers should put warning labels on content with false information, while 80 per cent said platforms should label “synthetic media” like deepfakes and AI content.
Solomon says the museum may revisit Hate Tags in the future, but they haven’t yet decided yet if they’re working on a new campaign.
“As an educational institution that really wants to make history relevant for today because of this rise in antisemitism and hate, I think we’re well positioned to be involved in contributing to the conversation,” Solomon says. “There is so much work to be done in this area.”
The Hate Tags campaign runs until June 29.
Read the article on the CJN website here.
