Godwin's law
Godwin's Law is known to be the oldest meme on the Internet, made by Mike Godwin. The memes meaning is to say: The longer an online conversation continues, The more of a chance there is to mention Hitler.
Godwin's law (or Godwin's rule), short for Godwin's law of Nazi analogies, is an Internet proverb asserting: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." The law's creator, Mike Godwin, maintains these comparisons often trivialize the Holocaust. It is an example of the reductio ad Hitlerum fallacy.
In 2021, Harvard researchers published an article showing that the Nazi-comparison phenomenon does not occur with statistically meaningful frequency in Reddit discussions.
History
Promulgated by American attorney and author Mike Godwin in 1990, Godwin's law originally referred specifically to Usenet newsgroup discussions. He stated that he introduced Godwin's law in 1990 as an experiment in memetics, specifically to address the ubiquity of such comparisons which he believes regrettably trivialize the Holocaust. 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 where reductio ad Hitlerum occurs.
In 2012, Godwin's law became an entry in the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Generalization, corollaries, and usage
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. 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:
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.
Godwin's law has many corollaries, some considered more "canonical" (by being adopted by Godwin himself) than others.
The public source identifies “Godwin's law” as godwin's Law is known to be the oldest meme on the Internet, made by Mike Godwin. The memes meaning is to say: The longer an online conversation continues, The more of a chance there is to mention Hitler. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Godwin's, known and oldest.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q154619. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2021, 1990 and 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “Godwin's law” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.