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Free Republic is a moderated Internet forum and activist site for Republicans and Neoconservatives from the United States. Founded in 1996 by Jim Robinson, it bills itself as "the premier on-line gathering place for independent, grass-roots conservatism on the web."
Free Republic's mission statement is:
"Broadly stated, the goals of this site are to further conservatism, expose political corruption, and recover a truly constitutional form of government. As a conservative site, Free Republic is pro-God, pro-life, pro-family, pro-Constitution, pro-Bill of Rights, pro-gun, pro-limited government, pro-private property rights, pro-limited taxes, pro-capitalism, pro-national defense, pro-freedom, and pro-America."
Origins and funding
Free Republic was founded in 1996 by Jim Robinson of Fresno, California. The site gained popularity during the President Clinton impeachment controversy when protests and write-in campaigns were organized on it.
The site is funded by donations requested through "Freepathons." These fundraising events occur each quarter, and are intended to raise funds to support Free Republic operations and compensate Robinson and others for their time.
Free Republic operates on an annual budget of approximately $260,000. .
Forums
Format and Policy
Free Republic's content consists largely of news stories and opinion pieces posted by its active user base, and discussion of these pieces by the users. Users generally post the full text of news stories. This has caused controversy due to the issue of copyright violation, and led to a lawsuit whose settlement is discussed later in this article.
The site's officially stated policy is to remove blatantly racist or bigoted postings.
Board users
Like most Internet chat forums, anyone can easily register as a user. Free Republic refers to its users as "members," but the site is free, with no fixed membership structure or dues. Some users of Free Republic organize themselves in ad hoc groups to plan local meets. (See discussion on Freeps below.)
There is a member directory, but like most on-line communities, nearly everyone has a pseudonym. Few users divulge their true identities in their on-line profiles. Many freepers meet in person on annual freeper cruises, titled "Freeps Ahoy."
All user accounts include an intra-site mail feature that can send, receive and store private messages to other users, without the use of external personal e-mail.
Members can alert each other to articles, posts, or ongoing discussions of mutual interest via ping lists, lists of users interested in a certain subject. Members can also ping each other individually and can use an alert window to be alerted with a sound when someone replies to one of their posts.
As of November 9, 2006, Alexa, a company that ranks the Internet's 100,000 most visited sites, and measures their traffic in users per million, estimated that Free Republic reached approximately three hundred and fifty users per million each day, and ranked at number 2,919 of all sites. Visits at Free Republic tend to spike sharply upward during election seasons and when news breaks which captures its users' interest.
Discussion generals
Members post articles from news sources and then discuss them with subsequent replies to the original post, and to each other. Comments posted by users of Free Republic are often critical of liberal political figures, institutions, ideology, liberals in general, and the media. Most of the comments are short, with some posts of longer length and substance.
The Free Republic community is largely united on certain political staples of the conservative movement, such as opposing liberalism, promoting conservative candidates for various elected offices, abolishing or editing some gun control laws and stopping the creation of new ones, lowering taxes, reducing personal welfare, ending abortion, and opposing what its members consider to be part of the "homosexual agenda", particularly same-sex marriage and the repealing of sodomy laws. On some issues, the Free Republic membership is divided. Three main groups can be observed on the forum: neoconservatives, paleoconservatives, and libertarians, with neoconservatism being represented in the large majority of posts. Libertarians arguably remain almost negligible in their numbers on Free Republic, as they are not banned by policy, but widely ridiculed by users with terms such as, "liberal-tarians".
Free Republic, like many politically oriented sites, does not seek to be a board that represents all political viewpoints, but those to the right of the political center, on issues concerning America. Articles posted which contain unwelcome reports or views (usually liberal) are customarily ridiculed and tagged with the words BARF ALERT after the headline. The "BARF ALERT" has two purposes: to warn readers in advance of news or opinion articles running counter to the prevailing perspective of the site's intended audience, and to protect the poster by distancing him- or herself from those views or news reports.
Another common term is ZOT! which refers to the banning of a user for posting unwelcome material or for making comments which a forum moderator then uses as a reason or excuse to ban. The moderators on Free Republic often ban, without warning or explanation, posters who criticize Israel, the 2003 invasion of Iraq or the operation in Afghanistan, Catholic complaints about the Catholic Church (on the religion forum), or who express any opinion which diverges from the site's political purposes, or that of a particular forum moderator. Ample examples exist of criticism of the President and Congress for not being sufficiently conservative or living up to the group's ideals. Generally, the amount of latitude one has to express his views expands significantly as he becomes better known on the site, establishes relationships with other users, and provides evidence of adhering to the rules and stated goals of the site and its owner, although this is no guarantee against a banning if one runs afoul of a particular forum's moderator. If banned in one forum, the member is banned from the entire site. There is no warning system on Free Republic, and no explanation is required to ban a user. It is not a 'democracy', and there is no provision for appeal. A poster becomes aware that he has been banned when he attempts to post or reply on Free Republic and is instead presented with the notice: "Your posting privilege has been revoked."
Free Republic was virtually unmoderated (with the exception of the efforts of Robinson himself) in its early years, however, Robinson asked several of the more trusted long-term members to volunteer as moderators in 2002. The moderators have the power to delete offensive content, including entire threads, and to suspend an account's posting privileges -- pending review and possible banning by Robinson.
Many posts on Free Republic are devoted to the ridicule of persons or groups perceived as anathema to conservatives. The site's officially stated policy is to remove blatantly racist or bigoted postings.
Sub-Forums
Free Republic is divided into a number of sub-forums. A reader may view threads from one forum at a time, or threads in all of them at once. The forums are:
- Bloggers & Personal
- User questions or opinion pieces, called "vanity threads" or "vanities", are posted in here, as well as blog entries from users. Vanities posted in the News/Activism forum are often moved here.
- General/Chat
- This catch-all category for threads that don't fit into one of the other forums.
- GOP Club
- The GOP Club contains threads pertaining to Republican Party business, as well as political news and analysis threads.
- News/Activism
- This forum is unofficially the "main" forum where most posting takes place. The other forums tend to be more limited in scope. Threads started in this forum are sometimes moved into one of the others by the moderators.
- Religion
- For religious topics. (see below)
- RLC Liberty Caucus
- The RLC forum is the most moribund of forums on Free Republic. It is for threads relating to the Republican Liberty Caucus or the Libertarian Party.
- Smoky Backroom
- Threads that have have become flamewars are moved here by the moderators. Few threads start in the Smoky Backroom.
- VetsCoR
- This forum is for military topics and supporting the troops.
Terminology
The Free Republic subculture has developed several specific expressions:
- Freeper
- An active member of the Free Republic site.
- Freep
- An event organized by a local Free Republic chapter. Freeps are often presented as responses to protests by various politically left-wing groups. Freepers, as Free Republic's active users are called, will assemble at some point with signs and banners, generally designed and hand-drawn by individual members. See Social Organization and Events.
- Freeping
- The participation in a Freep. For example, if a Freep was organized because of an appearance by Bill Clinton, a group of Freepers would say they were going to Freep Bill Clinton and would then congregate and Freep. Afterwards, one would say Bill Clinton had been Freeped. In some cases, freeping is the act of directing the members to influence an online poll. See Influencing polls. However, these could just be considered online freeps.
- Freepathon
- A quarterly fundraising event, aimed to collect donations for running the site.
- Freeploader
- A pejorative term to address those who may not have donated to the site. The term is not part of the official lexicon of the site, but its use is not discouraged by management. Many posters at Free Republic who do donate do not make their donations known as they prefer to donate privately. It has become a source of irritation to some freepers that this practice has begun, as some freepers do not have the financial means to donate, or as mentioned, wish to do so anonymously.
- BTTT or Bump
- Means "bump to the top" of the queue of articles to be read.
- Zot!
- An expression for an individual who has been banned.
- IBTZ
- Means "in before the zot."
- Freeptard
- A pejorative term for Freepers used by posters on liberal or left-wing sites such as Democratic Underground or the Daily Kos blog.
- DUmmie
- A pejorative term for members of Democratic Underground.
- Jaw Bone Media
- A term referring to conservative talk radio hosts "jaw boning" or spinning an issue and in response to the "Jaw Bone Media" referring to the mainstream media as the "Drive By Media"
Influencing polls
Some forum posts are aimed at influencing polls on other websites. Media websites (including newspapers, television networks, and America Online) run occasional "polls" that do not use the sampling methods of formal opinion polls, but instead invite everyone to respond. Known as "freeping" a poll, it involves posting a message thread directing members to vote en masse in an online poll and including a link to the poll with the intended goal of significantly affecting the final outcome. The practice of alerting members of online voting opportunities is not unique to Free Republic and is employed by many other activist websites of all political stripes; it appears to be a common practice at Democratic Underground, where it is known as "anti-freeping." However, Free Republic is believed to be the first online message board to try to influence online polls in this manner.
Political influence
Free Republic posters, notably "TankerKC" (later identified as active Air Force officer Paul Boley) and "Buckhead" (later identified as Atlanta attorney Harry W. MacDougald) contributed to breaking "Rathergate," the controversy surrounding CBS News' use of questionable documents during the 2004 US presidential campaign, which eventually resulted in the early retirement or forced resignations of Dan Rather, Mary Mapes and three other senior executives at CBS News. The discussion quickly spread across the Internet via blogs, and the Drudge Report and the Associated Press later picked it up . A few researchers differ with the conclusion that the documents were forged , however, American neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard quotes Joseph M. Newcomer, a Microsoft expert with a doctorate in computer science from Carnegie-Mellon University, as having prepared a 7000 word assertion that the documents were forgeries, . The facts contained in the documents are disputed by Killian's son, though he has not provided any evidence to support his claims . For a detailed analysis of these issues, see Killian documents authenticity issues.
Media Criticism
Ivor Tossell of the Globe and Mail called Free Republic "the worst site on the Internet, political-rhetoric division" and " an exercise in political extremism that, despite being something of an anthropological train wreck, keeps popping up square in the mainstream." He goes on to say :
- But what's interesting about Free Republic is that, despite having attracted a crowd of the most paranoid, xenophobic and reactionary characters the political landscape has to offer, it continues to find itself in the news. For instance, during the 2004 U.S. presidential election, it was central to the network of websites that uncovered the forged memos about Bush's Vietnam service that appeared on CBS News and ultimately cost Dan Rather his job.
Lawsuit regarding copyright and fair use
Because it has been a practice of Free Republic to allow its users to copy and paste copyrighted news stories in their entirety to its discussion boards, Free Republic was sued by The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. (Reuters and The Wall Street Journal were part of the original consortium threatening legal action, but they dropped out before the lawsuit was filed.) The tort complaint of $1,000,000 was filed in the US Court of the Southern District of California. Many members view the lawsuit as an unsuccessful conspiracy by a "liberal media" to stifle the organization; founder Robinson referred to the suit as "a life and death struggle with elements of the socialist propaganda machine." The federal trial court judge awarded summary judgment for $1,000,000 in damages to the two newspapers, plus over $1,000,000 in attorney's fees. Free Republic appealed this decision to the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
In a negotiated settlement, Free Republic agreed to remove the posted articles from the sites listed in the complaint, and paid these two newspapers $5,000 each -- a reduction of over 99.5% of the original summary judgment. Neither party was awarded any damages, legal fees or costs. Today, other publishers, such as Condé Nast Publications, have joined The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times in objecting to the posting of entire copyrighted articles. Users now post excerpts from such publishers (as allowed by fair use), and the site filters submissions against a watchlist of "banned" sources, by request of their webmaster or as a result of the lawsuit, as a precaution against future lawsuits.
References
See also
External links
- Official website
- Statement by the founder of Free Republic
- York, Anthony. "Free Republic defends Salon." Salon, 18 July 2001.
- Lauerman, Kerry. "They're here, they're mad, get used to it." Salon, 24 June 2001.
- Stein, Jeff. "Free-for-all at Free Republic: Lucianne Goldberg, Matt Drudge and other friends abandon the Clinton-bashing Web site over its attacks on George W. Bush" Salon, 13 July 1999.
- Journalism.nyu.edu on source verification, Dan Rather, and CBS.
- History of FR by Jim Robinson.