German dictator Adolf Hitler addresses a rally in Germany in 1933. (Photo : Getty Images/Hulton Archive)
It was revealed that 78 percent of active Reddit thread mentions Hitler at least once. It is likely that a user on a popular Reddit thread will come across Nazi Germany or Hitler's name often.
A data scientist who goes by the pseudo name Curious Gnu has examined nearly 4.6 million Reddit comments to discover the a whopping 78 percent subreddits having over 1,000 comments have mentioned Hitler or the Nazis at least once. He further found that a number of these subreddits, which are dedicated to political and geographical dialogue, also ask for comments regarding Nazis, CNN Money reported.
According to the Curious Gnu's analysis, a subreddit named "History" certainly has the largest number of mentions about the Nazis. About 2.5 percent of all the comments on this subreddit involve Hitler and related topics like the Nazis. Other sub-reddits like "AskHistorians," "European," "Italy," and "De" (brief for Deutschland) come next.
What is interesting is that even sub-reddits that are not related to history has plenty of mention about Hitler. Apparently, Adolf Hitler has turned out to be a meme with the increase of popularity of the Internet, especially on Reddit, Curious Gnu wrote.
As the author behind the study makes clear, this doesn't exactly prove Godwin's Law, as it only mines the data for mentions of those words, and not the context behind them (i.e., whether they were genuine comparisons, as stated in the popular web notion).
The data scientist has found that "Forwards from Grandma" is the top non-history subreddit with maximum references to Hitler. This is not surprising since this subreddit lists emails sent to people by their grandmothers.
Aside from "Forwards from Grandma," about 2 percent comments on the subreddit "GamerGhazi," a thread focused on the GamerGate debate, also mention Hitler or Nazis. This is followed by other subreddits like "The_Donald," "Ask TrumpSupporters," "ExMuslim," "CapitalismVSocialism" and "WorldNews," each of them having roughly 1 percent of comments referring to Nazi Germany.
While a spokesman for Reddit refused to comment when contacted, the increase in reference to Hitler or the Nazis should not come as a complete surprise to most Internet users. If truth be told, there is an Internet adage known as Godwin's Law that states that as an online discussion becomes longer, the chances of a comparison related to Hitler or Nazis increases.
Watch the video on "Godwin's Law and Hitler (Downfall parody)" below:
