Godwin's law, short for Godwin's law (or rule) of Nazi analogies, [1] is an Internet adage asserting: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." [2]
Godwin's law, short for Godwin's law (or rule) of Nazi analogies, [1] is an Internet adage asserting: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." [2]
Promulgated by the American attorney and author Mike Godwin in 1990, [1] Godwin's law originally referred specifically to Usenet newsgroup discussions. [3] He stated that he introduced Godwin's law in 1990 as an experiment in memetics, [1] specifically to address the ubiquity of such comparisons which he believes regrettably trivialize the Holocaust. [4] [5] Later, it was applied to any threaded online discussion, such as Internet forums, chat rooms, and social-media comment threads, as well as to speeches, articles, and other rhetoric [6] [7] where reductio ad Hitlerum occurs.
In 2012, Godwin's law became an entry in the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary . [8]
Godwin's law can be applied mistakenly or abused as a distraction, a diversion, or even censorship, when miscasting an opponent's argument as hyperbole even when the comparison made by the argument is appropriate. [9] Godwin has criticized the over-application of the adage, claiming that it does not articulate a fallacy, but rather is intended to reduce the frequency of inappropriate and hyperbolic comparisons: [10]
Although deliberately framed as if it were a law of nature or of mathematics, its purpose has always been rhetorical and pedagogical: I wanted folks who glibly compared someone else to Hitler to think a bit harder about the Holocaust.
In 2021, Harvard researchers published an article showing that the Nazi-comparison phenomenon does not occur with statistically meaningful frequency in Reddit discussions. [11] [12]
Godwin's law has many corollaries, some considered more canonical (by being adopted by Godwin himself) [2] than others. For example, many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums have a tradition that, when a Nazi or Hitler comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever made the comparison loses whatever debate is in progress. [13] This idea is itself sometimes mistakenly referred to as Godwin's law. [14]
Godwin rejects the idea that whoever invokes Godwin's law has lost the argument, and suggests that, applied appropriately, the rule "should function less as a conversation ender and more as a conversation starter." [15] In an interview with Time Magazine , Godwin said that making comparisons to Hitler would actually be appropriate under the right circumstances: [16]
I urge people to develop enough perspective to do it thoughtfully. If you think the comparison is valid, and you’ve given it some thought, do it. All I ask you to do is think about the human beings capable of acting very badly. We have to keep the magnitude of those events in mind, and not be glib. Our society needs to be more humane, more civilized and to grow up.
In August 2017, while commenting on the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Godwin himself endorsed and encouraged social-media users to compare its "alt-right" participants to Nazis. [17] [18]
Godwin has denied the need to update or amend the rule. in June 2018, he wrote, in an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times : "It still serves us as a tool to recognize specious comparisons to Nazism – but also, by contrast, to recognize comparisons that aren't." [15]
A Usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from users in different locations using the Internet. They are discussion groups and are not devoted to publishing news. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on the World Wide Web. Newsreader software is used to read the content of newsgroups.
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporarily archived. Also, depending on the access level of a user or the forum set-up, a posted message might need to be approved by a moderator before it becomes publicly visible.
When a message is replied to in e-mail, Internet forums, or Usenet, the original can often be included, or "quoted", in a variety of different posting styles.
Google Groups is a service from Google that provides discussion groups for people sharing common interests. Until February 2024, the Groups service also provided a gateway to Usenet newsgroups, both reading and posting to them, via a shared user interface. In addition to accessing Google groups, registered users can also set up mailing list archives for e-mail lists that are hosted elsewhere.
Forté Agent is an email and Usenet news client used on the Windows operating system. Agent was conceived, designed and developed by Mark Sidell and the team at Forté Internet Software in 1994 to address the need for an online/offline newsreader which capitalized on the emerging Windows GUI framework. By 1995, Agent had expanded to become a full-featured email client and remains a widely used application for integrating news and email communication on Windows. Agent supports POP email but not IMAP.
tin is an open-source, text-based, threaded newsreader, used to read and post messages on Usenet, the worldwide distributed discussion system.
A newsreader is an application program that reads articles on Usenet distributed throughout newsgroups. Newsreaders act as clients which connect to a news server, via the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), to download articles and post new articles. In addition to text-based articles, Usenet is also used to distribute binary files, generally in dedicated "binaries" newsgroups.
Reductio ad Hitlerum, also known as playing the Nazi card, is an attempt to invalidate someone else's argument on the basis that the same idea was promoted or practised by Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party. Arguments can be termed reductio ad Hitlerum if they are fallacious. Contrarily, straightforward arguments critiquing specifically fascist components of Nazism like Führerprinzip are not part of the association fallacy.
alt.atheism is a Usenet newsgroup within the alt.* hierarchy that discusses atheism. The group was originally created on February 6, 1990 by a member of the alt.pagan newsgroup, to provide an alternative forum for the numerous discussions on atheism that were overwhelming the pagan group. A survey of usenet groups in 1994–1995 found that, among 70 groups discussing "consciousness, spirituality, and religion ", it was the group with the highest traffic volume. Nash (2002) writes that "atheist and freethought newsgroups" including alt.atheism have "done much to remove the sense of isolation felt by many with antireligious opinions".
Nazi analogies or Nazi comparisons are any comparisons or parallels which are related to Nazism or Nazi Germany, which often reference Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, the SS, or the Holocaust. Despite criticism, such comparisons have been employed for a wide variety of reasons since Hitler's rise to power. Some Nazi comparisons are logical fallacies, such as reductio ad Hitlerum. Godwin's law asserts that a Nazi analogy is increasingly likely the longer an internet discussion continues; Mike Godwin also stated that not all Nazi comparisons are invalid.
An anonymous post, is an entry on a textboard, anonymous bulletin board system, or other discussion forums like Internet forum, without a screen name or more commonly by using a non-identifiable pseudonym. Some online forums such as Slashdot do not allow such posts, requiring users to be registered either under their real name or utilizing a pseudonym. Others like JuicyCampus, AutoAdmit, 2channel, and other Futaba-based imageboards thrive on anonymity. Users of 4chan, in particular, interact in an anonymous and ephemeral environment that facilitates rapid generation of new trends.
rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated is a moderated Usenet newsgroup that focuses on the science fiction television series Babylon 5 and the works of writer J. Michael Straczynski. It was spun off from its un-moderated version, rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5, in 1996. The newsgroup counts Straczynski as a frequent contributor, and was among the first internet-based forums where fans interacted directly with a 'showrunner'.
Michael Wayne Godwin is an American attorney and author. He was the first staff counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and he created the Internet adage Godwin's law and the notion of an Internet meme. From July 2007 to October 2010, he was general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation. In March 2011, he was elected to the Open Source Initiative board. Godwin has served as a contributing editor of Reason magazine since 1994. In April 2019, he was elected to the Internet Society board. From 2015 to 2020, he was general counsel and director of innovation policy at the R Street Institute. In August 2020, he and the Blackstone Law Group filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on behalf of the employees of TikTok, and worked there between June 2021 and June 2022. Since October 2022, he has worked as the policy and privacy lead at Anonym, a "privacy-safe advertising" startup.
Usenet, USENET, or "in full", User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.
Several individuals and groups have drawn direct comparisons between animal cruelty and the Holocaust. The analogies began soon after the end of World War II, when literary figures, many of them Holocaust survivors, Jewish or both, began to draw parallels between the treatment of animals by humans and the treatments of prisoners in Nazi death camps. The Letter Writer, a 1968 short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, is a literary work often cited as the seminal use of the analogy. The comparison has been criticized by organizations that campaign against antisemitism, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, particularly since 2006, when PETA began to make heavy use of the analogy as part of campaigns for improved animal welfare.
Internet pornography is any pornography that is accessible over the Internet; primarily via websites, FTP connections, peer-to-peer file sharing, or Usenet newsgroups. The greater accessibility of the World Wide Web from the late 1990s led to an incremental growth of Internet pornography, the use of which among adolescents and adults has since become increasingly popular.
The Nazi gun control argument is the claim that gun regulations in Nazi Germany helped facilitate the rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust. Historians and fact-checkers have characterized the argument as dubious or false, and point out that Jews were under 1% of the population and that it would be unrealistic for such a small population to defend themselves even if they were armed.
Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture which says that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views.
In argumentation theory, an argumentum ad populum is a fallacious argument which is based on claiming a truth or affirming something is good because many people think so.
Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany occur frequently in some veins of anti-Zionism in relation to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The legitimacy of these comparisons and their potential antisemitic nature is a matter of debate. Historically, figures like historian Arnold J. Toynbee have drawn parallels between Zionism and Nazism, a stance he maintained despite criticism. Scholar David Feldman suggests these comparisons are often rhetorical tools without specific antisemitic intent. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) sees them as diminishing the Holocaust's significance.
| Formal |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Informal |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
