Message boards and Usenet
Godwin’s law
1990
Godwin’s law is the rule Mike Godwin, an American lawyer and writer, made up in 1990: as an online discussion grows longer, the chance that someone compares someone or something to the Nazis or Hitler gets closer and closer to certain. It began on Usenet, the discussion groups of the early internet.
- Year
- 1990
- Made by
- Mike Godwin, a lawyer and writer
- Where it started
- Usenet newsgroups
- What it was
- A rule, posted as a reply
- Also called
- Godwin’s rule of Nazi analogies
The story
Godwin had noticed careless Nazi comparisons on bulletin boards through the 1980s and wanted people to stop making light of the Holocaust. So he dressed the idea up like a law of nature and posted it whenever a discussion slid into one, as an experiment in spreading an idea on purpose. Soon other people were citing it for him.
He told the story in Wired in October 1994, in an article called Meme, Counter-meme, one of the first uses of the word meme for something spreading online. The Oxford English Dictionary added Godwin’s law in 2012.
Many forums now treat it as a rule that whoever mentions Hitler first loses. Godwin does not: he has said a comparison can be fair when people have really thought it through.
Why it matters
It is an early case of someone making and spreading an internet meme on purpose, and of using one meme to push back against another, and it is still one of the best-known rules of arguing online.
Where it is now
It is still cited and even tested: a 2021 study of nearly 200 million Reddit posts found that Nazi comparisons came up in about one thread in ten and never came near certainty.
Sources
- Godwin’s law (Wikipedia)
- Godwin’s Law (Know Your Meme)
- The origin of Godwin’s law (Today I Found Out, 2016)
- Mike Godwin on Godwin’s law (Time, 2017)
- Godwin’s law, tested (Slate, 2022)
Checked against these sources on 25 October 2026.