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Democratic Underground, also known as DU, is an online community for Democrats and other progressives. Its membership is restricted by policy to those who are generally supportive of progressive ideals and support Democratic candidates for political office. DU was established on January 20, 2001, the day George W. Bush was inaugurated President.
According to Democratic Underground, as of March 2007, over 101,000 users have registered and over 28 million messages have been posted. DU publishes articles six days a week and has an online store, a directory of links, and forums where members may post on various topics of interest.
Features of Democratic Underground
Columns
DU has several regular columns, and on any given day may have a number of guest columns sent in from contributors.
- Mondays: Top Ten Conservative Idiots, a rundown of what DU administrators find as the most outrageous right-wing activities in the past week.
- Wednesdays: The Plaid Adder writes her column.
- Thursdays: Ask Auntie Pinko, an 'advice' column.
- In the past, DU occasionally featured a Hate Mailbag of hate mail, but no new updates have been posted since 2005.
Bernard Weiner and Ernest Partridge of The Crisis Papers are frequent guests.
Forums
The DU Forums are sites for political and non-political discussions by registered DU users. As of January 2007, the number of individual posts in these forums exceeded 27,000,000. The main forums on DU have been re-arranged since the close of the 2004 US election season. They now include:
- The Big Forums
- This section is the most active. Latest Breaking News, General Discussion, and General Discussion: Politics (which superseded "General Discussion: Campaign 2004") are the largest and fastest moving forums on DU. The Big Forums also include The Lounge, a friendly forum for general non-political discussion, Editorials and Other Articles for op-eds written by forum users, a Wiki-like Research forum, and the Video forum which contains links to Youtube.
- Topic Forums
- This section contains single-topic issue forums. Popular forums under this heading include Election Reform, Guns, the Israeli/Palestine conflict, Political Campaigns, and September 11th. Other topics include Education, Homeland Security, and Drug Policy. Some of the most popular forums under this topic are also some of the most controversial, and therefore the most closely moderated. (see below)
- State & Country Forums
- These provide a specific forum for each U.S. state, where state-wide and local issues are addressed. Residents and others with an interest in localized issues, such as congressional primaries and gubernatorial races, are encouraged to post questions in the state forums. Threads covering local news or events can be found in the state forums, and informal meetings of DU members are often coordinated from them. These "meet-ups" or "meets" include social gatherings, protest events, and political fundraisers. DU also provides forums for posters residing in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, as well as a catch-all "Democrats Abroad" forum. These serve a similar function to the U.S. state forums.
- DU Groups
- Groups of users may charter discussion forums for topics of mutual interest such as hobbies, fan clubs, and potential 2008 presidential candidates. Many of these forums cover non-political topics, such books, sports, and cooking, as well as political issues surrounding ethnicity and religion. These forums are generally not as fast moving as the "Big Forums".
An "Ask the Administrators" forum was maintained until April 26, 2005; this forum allowed users to pose questions to the board administrators. This forum has now been shut down by the administrators. A "Rules" page, a "Frequently Asked Questions" page, and a "Contact the Administrators" page showing the email addresses of the administrators have been substituted.
Administrators sometimes ban users for violating site policies.
DU This Poll
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. Some DU forum messages, usually captioned "DU this poll", urge DU members to vote 'en masse' in these polls. After voting, members report back to thread, usually simply writing "Done" or "Done and kicked" ("kicked" meaning the message thread is being moved to the top of the forum page by the new message so that other members will see it).
Member avatars
Registered members can select an avatar that will be displayed along with each of their forum postings. For donating members, this avatar can be a custom image that they have supplied; non-donating members can choose from a set of standard images that include popular symbols, images of political figures or popular culture figures, and state outlines, state flags, and a few national flags. These avatars allow users to show some of their personality with each posting.
When a user is banned from the site by the moderators, their member avatar is changed into an image of a tombstone. This has lead to the term "tombstoned" being used to describe banned users.
An online community
Through frequent contact in the forums (including special topic groups) and online private messages, members come to know one another. Discussions range beyond politics to include such diverse subjects as pets, pet peeves, and pop culture. Occasionally, members organize face-to-face get-togethers.
New members can be confused by DU vocabulary which includes references to pop culture ("this thread needs more cowbell"), deficient spelling skills (such as "cazy," "moran," and "noble jesters"), and long-running threads that have worked their way into DU lore ("dupe," "the kudzu thread").
Some common terms:
- Meets
- Social or activist events held by members. Also called "meet-ups".
- Tombstoned
- To be banned from posting.
- Repug
- Short for 'Repugnican'. A pejorative neologism for Republican.
- Freeper
- A term specifically for a member of the Free Republic website. Sometimes turned into the pejorative "FreepTard".
- Kick
- To post to a thread to send it to the top of the forum.
- Gungeon
- The Guns Discussion board under Topic Forums. From "Gun Dungeon".
- Milestone
- The occasion when a members post total reaches a certain number. Milestones are celebrated in the Lounge. (See below)
Lexicons of DU terminology can be found at Democratic Underground's Demopedia entry for Glossary.
When a new user posts a message, the message header shows the total number of posts that user has made. At the 1,000 post mark the total number of posts are no longer shown in the message header. The total number of posts a user has made can be found in their profile. Some prolific members have written many thousands of posts.
Campaign Underground
DU has an online campaign headquarters named "Campaign Underground." The site, which was put together with help from DU members, features a database of information about campaigns, voting trends, and media. A "media blaster" feature provides the ability to email local media outlets in many U.S. cities. Eventually DU hopes to have other features, such as integrated local news from the forums, a local event calendar, and other issues specific to states and locals.
Demopedia
On December 7, 2004, DU launched the beta version of Demopedia, a wiki based collaborative project aimed at presenting the Democratic and progressive opinion and outlook, and at collating and preserving some of the information generated on the forums. During the beta, only users who had registered at DU before December 7 were able to contribute. It uses the MediaWiki software.
Ideology
 | This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2007) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Although DU restricts its postings to people on the political left, members have many internal disagreements over a wide range of issues, as well as disagreements over tactics of opposition to the Bush Administration. The majority of members oppose the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but some DU members favor only a gradual withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, while other members favor an immediate and total pullout. Some members favor the death penalty, while a majority do not. Another such issue is gun politics; DU participants include supporters and opponents of further restrictions on gun ownership.
As on many other political forums, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a contentious issue. Supporters of both Israel and the Palestinians are present on the site, but there is a designated forum for the conflict and no discussion of the matter is allowed outside of this particular forum. Users who express overly critical viewpoints of either side may find themselves ostracised, or even blocked.
Activism
DUers are active in U.S. politics in many ways. Many of them attend political protests and rallies, volunteer for campaigns, and write letters to editors of newspapers and members of Congress. Some are among the members of the Democratic Party infrastructure, serving as precinct chairs. Others actually work within the confines of various legislative and congressional bodies as staff. Many active posters at Democratic Underground have worked for various causes in both paid and unpaid positions, in campaigns and for special interest groups such as the AFL-CIO and SEIU. Others are members of the DLC, Progressive Democrats of America, MoveOn, and Democracy for America.
Activist Corps
Founded on July 1, 2005, the Activist Corps is a group of over 1,000 DUers who are committed to taking action on a certain issue whenever an official Activist Corps activity is posted.
The first Activist Corps action was posted on July 12; members wrote letters to the editors of local newspapers regarding Karl Rove's role in the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame's name. More than 70 letters were published in newspapers throughout the country. Other Corps activities have included signing onlinepetitions to U.S. Senators asking them to reject Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, and to write letters of support Cindy Sheehan.
Owners
The website is owned by Democratic Underground, LLC (a limited liability company), and run by David Allen, who posts under the screen name "Skinner" while on the boards and handles most of the issues relating to the forums. The other two administrators, "EarlG" (of Washington, D.C.) and "elad" (of Portland, OR), handle the articles and technical issues, respectively.
Criticism
Democratic Underground has been criticized for censorship directed against both the political left and the right. From the left, critics say that administrators and moderators unfairly ban or censor members who support the Green Party, Peace and Freedom Party and other parties to the left of the DNC. Right leaning Democrats, or those who support the Iraq War are often disparaged by DU posters.
The site's authors do, in fact, freely admit that they censor viewpoints they disagree with, and go so far as to mock those who believe this is unfair or hypocritical.
The People for Change forum was founded by Howard Dean supporters who felt alienated from Democratic Underground during the 2004 primary season, many of whom had been banned from the Democratic Underground forums. Some DU members claim that the moderators of the Israel-Palestinian forums enforce an anti-Palestinian bias.
Controversial comments
Discussions from posters at DU have drawn criticism. One example of this was the dialog about the 2004 tsunami disaster, in which a few posts explored the possibility of "earthquake weapons". The posts were reported by The New York Times and Fox News. The DU administrators deleted these posts and the threads were locked. The administrators officially disavowed what they called "kooky tsunami conspiracy theories". They added, "One wonders why the author did not spend five minutes over at Free Republic and instead write an article about how conservatives think the tsunami was some sort of retribution from God, or how Muslims deserved it."
Another example is the conspiracy theories revolving around the August 2006 terror plot to blow up airliners between the UK and the US, which received mention in USA Today. Some posters felt that the American government's push to step-up the announcement of the plot was a conspiracy to bump Joe Lieberman's primary loss out of the news cycle.
The site also saw criticism when, in 2003, a poster explained why he or she wished to see continued bloodshed in Iraq and in the days following the death of Ronald Reagan, when profane comments appeared that expressed joy over his passing.
Two posters to Democratic Underground were investigated by the Secret Service for posts that, according to David Allen, violated the DU policy stating "Do not post messages that could be construed as advocating harm or death to the president or other high-ranking official in the United States government." Neither the comments nor the poster's identities are public knowledge, but David Allen said that both members had been banned prior to DU being notified of the investigation, and that no subpoenas have been issued to date.
James Taranto claimed an unscientific poll on the DU site found that, by a margin of 71%-29%, the results of the 2004 presidential election were more depressing than the 9/11 terrorist attacks . The wife of former Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards criticized members who did not feel compassion for Laura Ingraham in her fight with breast cancer; several members of the site had allegedly posted mean-spirited comments about Ingraham in reference to her illness.
References
- Democratic Underground - Rules
- Democratic Underground - Registrations
- Democratic Underground - Forums
- Democratic Underground Contacts
- Fox News
- Democratic Underground - discussion
- USA Today
- MSNBC
- Opinion Journal
- Frontpagemag.com
- Democratic Underground Thread - David Allen
- Democratic Underground Journal - David Allen
- Opinion Journal - Presidential Election
- Opinion Journal - Laura Ingraham
See also
External links
- Democratic Underground homepage
- John Kerry and the Lost Kos - Wired article mentions Democratic Underground.