Godwin's law

ops culture

The adage that as an online argument grows longer, a comparison to Nazis becomes inevitable.

Mike Godwin coined it in 1990 to push back on cheapened historical analogies, and by convention whoever first reaches for the comparison is taken to have lost the thread. It has become shorthand for the way heated threads decay.

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison to Hitler approaches one. Mike Godwin formulated it in 1990 as an observation about Usenet, and it was deliberately constructed as a memetic countermeasure: he wanted people to think twice before reaching for the comparison, and stating the pattern as a law made it visible.

The corollary that developed in practice is that whoever makes the comparison has lost the argument, which is not part of the original and is often applied badly. Godwin himself has repeatedly clarified that genuine comparisons to fascism are sometimes apt, and that his law was aimed at reflexive hyperbole rather than at historical argument. Using the law to shut down a serious point is the misuse he specifically objects to.

Its wider value is as an early example of naming a discourse pattern in order to change it. The same technique produced bikeshedding, whataboutism and a dozen other terms whose function is to let someone point at a rhetorical move rather than argue against it line by line. Naming a pattern is a genuinely powerful intervention, and it is also a tool that can be used to dismiss things that deserve engagement.

Also known as: Godwin's law

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