Social network sites (SNS) have recently become an active ground for interactions on contested and dissonant heritage, on the heritage of excluded and subaltern groups, and on the heritage of collective traumatic past events. Situated at the intersection between heritage studies, memory studies, Holocaust studies, social media studies and digital heritage studies, a growing body of scholarly literature has been emerging in the past 10 years, addressing online communication practices on SNS. This study, an integrative review of a comprehensive corpus of 80 scholarly works about difficult heritage on SNS, identifies the profile of authors contributing to this emerging area of research, the increasing frequency of publication after 2017, the prevalence of qualitative research methods, the global geographic dispersion of heritage addressed, and the emergence of common themes and concepts derived mostly from the authors ‘home’ fields of memory studies, heritage studies and (digital) media studies.

The Venclova House-Museum is probably the most discussed museum in Lithuania today. Not only are the museum’s activities and the communication of the collection discussed, but also the general question of the need for and value of this museum. In February and March 2022, a study of the museum’s performance was carried out on the Internet. The research highlighted the main and the most debated problems relating to the communication of the museum, as well as identifying fundamental communication errors which have been made by this cultural heritage communication institution. During the research, parallels between the process of museum decolonisation (which is currently taking place in museums all over world), and the main communicational issues of the Venclova House-Museum were also identified. The study includes a semantic analysis of the museum’s performance on the Internet, a qualitative content analysis of discussions on Facebook, and semi-structured interviews with participants in the discussion.