Godwin's Law is a statement maintaining that the longer an online discussion continues, the more likely someone will compare someone else to Hitler or the Nazis. The law is sometimes considered facetious and sometimes taken more seriously. This typically sees a commenter liken someone to Hitler or call that person a Nazi, and often the individual described is either a participant in the discussion or a public figure. These comparisons tend to come through ideological differences that cannot be resolved. The law is considered to apply to any conversation about any conceivable topic.
The creator of the law, Mike Godwin, formulated the law in 1990. The original formulation is: as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1 (or reaches certainty). The law is intended to be pseudo-scientific and is intended to evoke the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which covers the inevitable decay of physical systems over time.
Originally, the law referred to the USENET newsgroup discussion boards and bulletin board systems (BBS) of the early internet; it has since been applied to any online conversation and has extended to offline conversations, such as the cable news cycle, scientific and medical ethics, and politics.
Godwin's Law has been considered by some to be an extension or update of a logical fallacy developed by the philosopher Leo Strauss. Coined in 1951, the logical fallacy was coined reductio ad Hitlerum, or modern Latin for "reduction to Hitler," and is a take on the reductio ad absurdum, or reduction to the absurd. Leo Strauss considered his reductio ad Hitlerum principle as an attempt to discredit an opponent's view by comparing it to something supported by Hitler or Nazism and is considered a sign of desperation or intellectual laziness, especially as, Strauss noted, one could invalidate food because Hitler ate food, and Hitler was a genocidist; therefore, food cannot be good.
Another that has come out of Godwin's Law has been what the French call le point Godwin, which translates to "the Godwin point" and is defined as the point in which a conversation or debate turns and someone calls their ideological opponent a "Nazi" rather than dealing with their opponent's point. This is influenced by Godwin's Law but exemplifies the reach of the original Godwin's Law.
Mike Godwin developed what has been called "Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies" when he was a law student in Austin, Texas in 1990. He has said in an interview that he saw the law as a "counter-meme" (with Godwin also considered one of the earliest to refer to internet trends as a "meme") intended to get people to think harder about history and recognize the crimes and horrors of the Nazi regime were not merely a trope for internet blowhards arguing about hot political topics. Godwin describes seeding the concept on these different discussion boards before it took on a life of its own and before it again took on more of a life of its own.
Godwin would be hired right out of law school by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit umbrella of legal counsel that seeks to extend the protections of the United States Constitution to cyberspace. And in his work there, he worked in cases to protect the internet and those using it from federal agencies.
As noted above, Godwin's Law has remained relevant and popular, breaking from internet culture into mainstream culture. However, this has led to a study published in 2022 that evaluated nearly 200 million Reddit posts to find out if Godwin's Law remained. What the study found was that references to "Hitler" and "Nazis" did not occur with a high degree of frequency, and after a certain point, the probability of observing these words decreased. A counterintuitive outcome, especially given the prevalence of the comparison in mainstream conversations, but according to the findings of the research, Reddit posters were not falling to Godwin's Law.
Further, according to the study's authors, the Reddit results suggest it is not inevitable that conversations eventually disintegrate into calling others Nazis or Hitler. The study's authors did note that they were not trying to kill Godwin's Law, but instead wanted to test it.
Godwin's Law has also been evoked in different events, riots, and protests where the individual actors have been called or referred to as Nazis or neo-Nazis. In this case, Godwin's Law tends to be invoked to stop references to these individuals as Nazis or neo-Nazis. And some reached out to Mike Godwin to ask about these cases, such as the protests that occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. In his response, Mike Godwin noted that he did not like to comment on current events or the use of the law named after him, other than to suggest some may take it too seriously as a law, except to say in some cases calling a person a Nazi or neo-Nazi is warranted based on their activities, the insignia they wear, and related behaviors.
The reach of Godwin's Law has even reached bio and medical ethics. The law has permeated the field of bioethics and medical ethics and has been used or invoked often in fear against specific medical practices, such as medical aid in dying, and where, instead of a person relating an individual in a comment thread to Hitler or the Nazis, the medical practice is compared to the horrors of the Holocaust. This is often done to stop the argument for a potentially controversial but beneficial medical practice. And it has led to bioethicists and medical ethicists to call for an end of Godwin's law.
