Teaching on Thin Ice: Social Media, Epistemic Conflict, and the Targeting of History Educators

This chapter argues that the targeting of history educators often reflects deeper epistemic conflicts between rival metanarratives. Social media play a central role in amplifying and restructuring these conflicts. Contrary to initial hopes, social media have not dissolved historical metanarratives, but transformed them. The fragmentation, decontextualization, and viral dissemination of content facilitated by platform affordances particularly favor populist and other identity based discourses, as they enable historical concepts to function as empty signifiers stripped of nuance. Through cases from France (Samuel Paty) and Bolsonaro’s Brazil, the chapter shows how social media create parallel information ecosystems that bypass traditional epistemic gatekeepers, which fuels conflicts that contest not merely historical interpretation but the very purpose and legitimacy of history education itself.