According to Fortune, Instagram’s algorithm is actively promoting Nazi content to millions of users, with reels featuring Hitler speeches and Holocaust denial regularly hitting 1-5 million views each. The investigation found creators earning thousands of dollars from this content, including a UK tech worker making over £10,000 from T-shirt sales and a Pakistani teenager earning $800-900 monthly through clip-farm platform Whop. This explosion followed Meta’s January 2025 policy changes that ended third-party fact-checking in the US and loosened political content rules. Major brands including JPMorgan Chase, Porsche, and the U.S. Army are running ads directly alongside this extremist content. Despite Meta’s community standards explicitly prohibiting Holocaust denial and hate speech, the company’s own algorithm continues to surface and promote violating content.
How we got here
Here’s the thing: this isn’t some accidental algorithmic quirk. Meta made a deliberate choice back in January to dial back content moderation. They raised the confidence threshold for removing hate speech and ended third-party fact-checking in the US. Basically, the systems that were supposed to catch this stuff were “intentionally made less sensitive,” as Meta’s former Director of Responsible Innovation put it.
And the timing is… interesting, to say the least. This all happened just months after Donald Trump threatened to imprison Mark Zuckerberg over election interference claims. Suddenly Zuckerberg was donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and attending the event himself. Coincidence? Maybe. But the creators Fortune interviewed said the change was immediate – content that would’ve been flagged before suddenly started hitting millions of feeds.
The money pipeline
Look, hate sells. That’s the uncomfortable truth here. These creators aren’t necessarily true believers – they’re entrepreneurs exploiting a broken system. The UK meme page owner told Fortune that Hitler and Holocaust content “always gets more traction.” The Pakistani teen gets paid $0.10 per thousand views by Whop, a clip-farm platform that basically encourages creators to post whatever performs best.
What’s really wild is that major advertisers are funding this whole ecosystem without even knowing it. Fortune found JPMorgan Chase ads running back-to-back with Holocaust denial content. The monetization pipes remain wide open, and brands either don’t know or don’t care about the adjacency. When your entire business model is built on engagement at any cost, this is what you get.
Meta’s impossible position
So why can’t Meta just fix this? Well, they’ve painted themselves into a corner. After years of criticism about over-moderation and political bias, they’ve swung hard in the other direction. Their hateful conduct policy and dangerous organizations policy still technically prohibit all this content. But enforcement has clearly collapsed.
Meta claims they actioned “nearly 21 million pieces of content” in the first half of 2025 for violating their dangerous organizations policy. But they couldn’t explain how the specific reels Fortune flagged managed to stay up long enough to generate millions of views. The reality is their automated systems are prioritizing engagement over safety, and human review has been scaled back dramatically.
Bigger than Groypers
While Washington argues about whether 30-40% of young Republican staffers are “Groypers” (fans of white nationalist Nick Fuentes), the real story is happening on Instagram. This isn’t some fringe movement anymore – it’s mainstream content reaching millions of Gen Z users who might not even realize they’re being radicalized.
The algorithm makes it feel like you’re “discovering the truth” yourself. One reel leads to another, and suddenly your feed is full of antisemitic propaganda packaged as edgy humor. And the creators? They’re not ideologues – they’re just kids making bank off a system that rewards the worst impulses. Meta’s “more speech, fewer mistakes” approach has basically created a hate-speech gold rush. The question is: how much damage will be done before someone puts a stop to it?
