Democratic Underground

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Democratic Underground, also known as DU, describes itself as an "online community for Democrats and other progressives." According to its web page, its membership is restricted by policy to those who are "generally supportive of progressive ideals," and who "support Democratic candidates for political office." The scope of discussion is wide and members represent a broad spectrum of liberal beliefs and backgrounds. DU was established on January 20, 2001, the day George W. Bush was inaugurated President.

According to Democratic Underground in October 2006, over 96,493 username registrations have occurred and over 25 million messages have been posted. There is no indication as to how many of these registrations are active or how many of these registrations represent unique persons. There is no cost for membership and participation. Voluntary donations are solicited quarterly, and some services are available only to donating members. 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.

Democratic Underground has been criticized for censorship directed against both the political left and the right, as well as for death threats against government officials and other unusual and controversial comments posted by contributors.

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 a highly active scene for political discussions by "Democrats and other progressives". On 2006-09-06, the number of individual posts in these forums exceeded 25,000,000. The main forums on DU have been re-arranged since the close of the 2004 US election season. They now include:

The Big Forums

A significant fraction of the site's posts reside in the Big Forums. Latest Breaking News, General Discussion, and General Discussion: Politics (which superseded "General Discussion: Campaign 2004") are the largest and fastest moving forums on DU.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, which is 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 link 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.

Influencing polls

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. The goal is to influence polls to reflect the aggregrate votes of DU members. 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.

Like any other community, DU has its in-jokes. New members are often confused by DU vocabulary, usually referencing pop culture ("this thread needs more cowbell"), deficient spelling skills (such as "cazy," "moran," and "noble jesters"), or long-running threads that have worked their way into DU lore ("dupe," "the kudzu thread").

Some common terms are:

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)

More complete of lexicons of DU terminology can be found at Democratic Underground's Demopedia entry for Glossary.

Administrators tombstone (ban) users for violating site policies. This includes trolls, conservatives, individuals who habitually accuse others of being conservatives, individuals that lack thick skin, and long-time posters who refuse to abide by the rules.

When a new user posts a message, the message header shows the total number of posts that user has made. This identification helps members spot trolls. The 1,000 post mark is an important milestone, because 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. The more posts a user has, generally the more reliable the poster is considered, and 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

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. Nearly all 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 conflict between Israel and Palestine is a contentious issue. Supporters of both Israel and Palestine are present on the site, but there is a designated forum for the Israel-Palestine 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

One of the newest ways in which DUers are involved is called the DU 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 a David Allen, who posts under the screen name "Skinner"[1] 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, and for death threats against government officials that have been posted by DU members. From the left, critics say that administrators and moderators unfairly ban ("tombstone") 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 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.

Death threats against government officials

On October 27, 2006 Allen announced that DU had been contacted by Secret Service agents as part of an investigation of comments posted at DU. Allen cited the relevant DU posting policy:

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. ...

Allen then posted the following explanation:

[Today] we have had two separate inquiries from the Secret Service about posts on our website. The inquiries involved three posts by two separate visitors to our website. Incidentally, both of the people in question were banned last week -- before we were aware that the Secret Service was looking into their postings. I'm not going to go into the details of the posts in question, except to say that all three of them would have been covered by the passage from the Democratic Underground rules that I posted above. (One of these posts was deleted by the moderators, two were not.) The United States Secret Service has asked Democratic Underground to hand over any identifying or personal information we have about the two individuals in question. ... On the advice of our lawyer, we have declined to voluntarily hand over any information about the two individuals in question. ... The Secret Service has informed us that they intend to get subpoenas in order to compel us to hand over the information. [2]

Citing comments

Discussions at DU sometimes lead to certain contributions and unusual comments. 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 [of the Times article] 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, the poster "Starpass" explained why she "hoped the bloodshed continues in Iraq.". There was also criticism of the site in the days following the death of Ronald Reagan when some posters wrote things like: "To Ronald Reagan, may you rot in hell you sorry evil creep!"

See also

• Fitzmas
• Free Republic - Conservative rival of DU

External links

• Democratic Underground homepage
  • DU Forums
  • Demopedia
  • Campaign Underground
• John Kerry and the Lost Kos - Wired article mentions Democratic Underground.