Digital Trauma Processing in Social Media Groups: Transgenerational Holocaust Trauma on Facebook

This paper studies the impact of digital and social media on transgenerational trauma processing, examining how different Facebook groups, public or closed, influence the ways in which people communicate about a collective historical trauma. It touches upon the issue of research ethics in connection with the handling of sensitive data in social media research. It examines two Hungarian Facebook groups on Holocaust memory, and a book, compiled as a collection of posts from the group The Holocaust and My Family. As a case study, it analyzes a post and the related comments in which a descendant of a perpetrator comes out in the Facebook group The Descendants of the Victims and Survivors of the Holocaust.