Godwin's law (or Godwin's rule), short for Godwin's law 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 (or Godwin's rule), short for Godwin's law 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] Additionally, when a potential subject of Godwin's law seems "intent on making the Hitler comparison", [19] the comparison with fascism may be appropriate rather than devaluing the argument; a "MAGA" corollary to the Law recognizes the pernicious embrace of Nazi-inspired tropes and phrases by the "alt-right".
In 2023, Godwin published an opinion on The Washington Post stating "Yes, it's okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don't let me stop you." In the article, Godwin says "But when people draw parallels between Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy and Hitler’s progression from fringe figure to Great Dictator, we aren’t joking. Those of us who hope to preserve our democratic institutions need to underscore the resemblance before we enter the twilight of American democracy." [20]
Sporgery is the disruptive act of posting a flood of articles to a Usenet newsgroup, with the article headers falsified so that they appear to have been posted by others. The word is a portmanteau of spam and forgery, coined by German software developer, and critic of Scientology, Tilman Hausherr.
An Internet forum, 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 was 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 writes that "atheist and freethought newsgroups" including alt.atheism have "done much to remove the sense of isolation felt by many with antireligious opinions".
Fascist has been used as a pejorative or insult against a wide range of people, political movements, governments, and institutions since the emergence of fascism in Europe in the 1920s. Political commentators on both the Left and the Right accused their opponents of being fascists, starting in the years before World War II. In 1928, the Communist International labeled their social democratic opponents as social fascists, while the social democrats themselves as well as some parties on the political right accused the Communists of having become fascist under Joseph Stalin's leadership. In light of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, The New York Times declared on 18 September 1939 that "Hitlerism is brown communism, Stalinism is red fascism." Later, in 1944, the anti-fascist and socialist writer George Orwell commented on Tribune that fascism had been rendered almost meaningless by its common use as an insult against various people, and argued that in England the word fascist had become a synonym for bully.
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.
Conversation threading is a feature used by many email clients, bulletin boards, newsgroups, and Internet forums in which the software aids the user by visually grouping messages with their replies. These groups are called a conversation, topic thread, or simply a thread. A discussion forum, e-mail client or news client is said to have a "conversation view", "threaded topics" or a "threaded mode" if messages can be grouped in this manner. An email thread is also sometimes called an email chain.
Holocaust trivialization refers to any comparison or analogy that diminishes the scale and severity of the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. The Wiesel Commission defined trivialization as the abusive use of comparisons with the aim of minimizing the Holocaust and banalizing its atrocities.
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.
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.
Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany occur frequently in the political discourse of anti-Zionism. Given the legacy of the Holocaust, the nature of these comparisons, and particularly whether they constitute antisemitism, is a matter of ongoing debate.
The Goebbels gap is an Internet adage defined as the amount of time between a negative event in the world and when someone blames it on the Jews. Promulgated by the American writer Yair Rosenberg, then a senior writer at Tablet magazine, in 2019, it is seen as a proof point of seemingly every conspiracy theory eventually targeting the Jews. It is named for Nazi chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who engineered the deeply virulent antisemitic propaganda of the Third Reich.
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