Free Republic

Free Republic is a moderated Internet forum and activist site for conservatives from the United States. It bills itself as "the premier online gathering place for independent, grass-roots conservatism on the web."

Free Republic logo

Free Republic logo

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. [1].

Forums

Format

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.

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 above).

There is a member directory, but like most online communities, nearly everyone has a pseudonym. Few users divulge their true identities in their online profiles. However, 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 June 5, 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 four hundred users per million each day, and ranked at number 2,017 of all sites. Comparatively, by Alexa Internet's estimation, DemocraticUnderground ranked 4,122 and reached 150 per million, Wikipedia.org reached over 40,000 thousand per million each day and ranked at 16, Yahoo reached 285,000 and ranked at no. 1, and Google reached 279,000 and ranked at no. 2. Visits at Free Republic tend to spike sharply upward during election seasons and when news breaks which captures its users' interest. [2] [3]

Note, however, that Alexa may not be a reliable means of determining traffic to a website. [4][5][6]

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 insults, 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, however, 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". A particular example can be found during the Terri Schiavo court battle, when a Libertarian poster argued against George W. Bush's interventionist actions, and was unanimously condemned by hundreds of posters for it.[7] Similarly, opposition to U.S. support for Israel is not tolerated. Divisive issues include evolution, immigration control and immigrant cultural assimilation, free trade, state authority vs. individual rights, and the legalization of soft drugs.

An example of the breakdown of members might be discerned from a theoretical poll put out by the forum administrators in early 2006 which asked if its members would continue to vote for the GOP if Republicans in the federal government failed to act aggressively on illegal immigration. The poll found that only 46% of its registered users would vote for Republicans in the United States House elections, 2006, 31% would vote for third parties, 20% would stay home and a marginal 2.5% would vote for the Democrats[8]. John McCain's image on the forums is emblematic of the forum users' staunch conservatism. McCain is widely hated by forum members. A recent internal poll illustrated that less than 45% of users would vote for McCain if he were the Republican nominee for president in 2008, with some 10-15% saying they would prefer to sit the election out and another 30% pledging to vote for third party candidates.

Free Republic, like many politically oriented sites, does not seek to be a board that represents all political viewpoints: it is a meeting point for those to the right of the political center in America, and 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. This is often used by "moles" from left-leaning discussion boards who want to present Free Republic users with news that runs counter to their belief system without getting "Zotted".

Another common term is ZOT! which refers to the banning of a user for posting unwelcome material. 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, or who express any opinion which diverges from the site's political purposes, from its discussion boards. Material criticizing the administration of President George W. Bush from a non-Republican perspective is typically not permitted. However, 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. There is no warning system on Free Republic, and no explanation is required to ban a user. 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."

In addition to political discussions, Free Republic has an active Religion forum, which tends to be dominated by discussions of the Roman Catholic Church and the crisis of Anglicanism, with reposts of classic Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant books and sermons.

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 9th District Circuit Court. 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."

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. 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.

Terminology

The Free Republic subculture has developed several specific expressions:

• Freeper is an active member of the Free Republic site.
• Freep is 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 is most often 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 is a quarterly fundraising event, aimed to collect donations for running the site.
• Freeploader is 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! is an expression for an individual who has been banned.

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, however, Free Republic is believed to be the first online message board to try to influence online polls in this manner. The Free Republic’s members have been known to have been involved in vandalism against websites they perceive to be liberal, with administrators often calling for a coordinated [9][10] vandalism against information websites they perceived to have a liberal bias, primarily related to major racial and political topics. Several administrators have actively endorsed plan’s for these attacks and have gone as far as providing tips on how to evade detection.

Political influence

Free Republic posters contributed to breaking "Rathergate," the controversy surrounding CBS News' use of questionable documents during the 2004 US presidential campaign. Nineteen minutes after its broadcast began, poster "TankerKC" questioned the documents on-line, stating they were "not in the style that we used when I came into the USAF." Another poster, "Buckhead" (later identified as Atlanta attorney Harry W. MacDougald), made an on-line observation that the documents were in a proportionally spaced font, and stated, "these documents are forgeries," less than four hours after CBS broadcast their story [11]. He ended his "Post 47" on that thread with the words, "This should be pursued aggressively." The following morning, Scott Johnson, a co-author of the Internet blog Power Line [12], received an e-mail which "...quoted from and linked to [the] post." He published the quote and a link to the Free Republic thread, saying, "'Hey, anybody else out there among our readers have any information about this?'" The discussion quickly spread across the Internet via blogs, and the Drudge Report and the Associated Press later picked it up. The questioning of the document's legitimacy -- they were found to be 100% identical to how the same documents would look in Microsoft Word, which wouldn't be invented until almost twenty years later -- caused CBS to investigate internally and eventually retract the story.

Also during that campaign, Jerome Corsi, co-author of the controversial book Unfit for Command that attacked the Vietnam war record of Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry, apologized in the national media for homophobic and anti-Islam comments, as well as slurs made against liberal political figures, that he made on Free Republic under the user name "jrlc." The posts were discovered and made public by Media Matters for America, a liberal website [13]. Concerning the remarks, Corsi said, "I don't stand by any of those comments and I apologize if they offended anybody," and, "...the politically incorrect humor I posted on this site is evidently not funny to everyone. Detractors should have interviewed my dog. No matter how I frame a comment, "Chico" has yet to laugh." Subsequently, John O'Neill, the book's other co-author, attempted to distance himself from Corsi and attempted to downplay Corsi's involvement in the writing of the book.

Social organization and events

Freepers counter-protest at an anti-war demonstration at Arlington National Cemetery on October 2, 2004.

There are local chapters within Free Republic which are organized through ping lists, e-mail, and Free Republic mail.

The more active chapters organize live protests, which they call "Freeps." Often these are counter protests, as responses to protests by groups who they oppose. "Freepers," as Free Republic's active users are called, will assemble at a predetermined location with signs and banners which are generally designed and hand-drawn by individual members.

Inspiration

Free Republic has spawned a number of other, similar sites in other countries - predominantly English-speaking western countries. The most successful of these has been Free Dominion, in Canada.

Criticism

Allegations Of extremism and bigotry

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. [14]

Free Republic is often accused of being extremist and far-right (even popular conservative talk show host Sean Hannity has described the site as "fringe" [15]), and has been criticized for harboring "hate speech" regarding certain groups of people, such as homosexuals, Arabs, Muslims, Han Chinese and illegal immigrants. An example the site's alleged extremism and bigotry can be found in 2005, when a forum poster circulated a petition asking the Iranian government not to execute two homosexual teenagers, but was rebuked by forum users for his position (some of the users supported the execution, for various reasons, including allegations that the teenagers were being executed for sexual assault on a minor, as opposed to simply being homosexual).[16] Some members have also expressed support for Apartheid South Africa [17]. Many members also strongly supported Tom Tancredo's statement that the United States should "nuke" Mecca in retalation for a further terrorist attack on American soil.[18]

Many Free Republic users attribute these accusations to political correctness and deny that they have any basis in fact.

Call for US authorities to end Free Republic's 'misuse' of the net

In August 2006, after what were considered offensive comments were posted on Free Republic about a Bahraini Guantanamo detainee there was a call by the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, an organization with close links to Islamist parties and the now defunct Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain, for the US authorities to act 'to end the misuse of the net'. The Center said "These comments are sickening - and are an incitement to racial or religious hatred. What they are saying goes against human rights by spreading hatred and we should urge the government to work for an end to the misuse of the Internet to spread hatred against certain races or religions'[19]. Previously Free Republic had listed the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain as a 'terrorist organization'.

Cyber stalking

Members of Free Republic have been accused of cyberstalking.

One case involved the owner of a restaurant who notified authorities when an underage Jenna Bush attempted to illegally purchase liquor at the establishment. The owner's name, residential address, date of birth, drivers license and registration information, physical description, and information about her infant child was posted on the Free Republic forums by users. Forum users then advocated violence toward the restaurant's patrons, as well as destroying it physically. [20][21].

Another example is when the members of Free Republic, along with other conservative web sites participated in the cyberstalking and physical stalking of Andy Stephenson while he was dying of cancer. Freepers claimed that Andy Stephenson did not have cancer, and interfered in the fundraising for his operation and later with the Medicaid benefits for his aftercare and terminal hospital care. Their claims were fanned by several instances of the hospital refusing to answer questions due to HIPAA, Stephenson's friends and family refusing to release information due to privacy concerns, and the DU management deleting all threads relating to Stephenson. See: ; see main article.

• Original complaint against Andy Stephenson
• The Stalking of Andy Stephenson by Beth Ferrari
• Seattle Weekly: "A Fight To The End"
• Seattle Weekly: "Internet Martyr - The life and cruel death of Andy Stephenson."

See also

• Democratic Underground - Roughly the liberal equivalent of Free Republic.
• Killian documents

External links

• Official website
• Statement by the founder of Free Republic
• "Best Of Free Republic" Blog A blog with quotations from the site
• Pitt, William Rivers. "God Sees The Freepers." Editorial. Truthout: 9 June 2001.
• Pitt, William Rivers. "God Still Sees The Freepers." Editorial. Truthout: 12 June 2001.
• Niman, Michael I. "Disturbing the Peace: Creepy 'FReepers' Target Activists." ArtVoice: 13 March 2003.
• Free Republic Sucks Website with links to anti-FReeper sites and online forums, with an explanation of their provenance. No longer updated.
• 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.
• Clown Posse a popular site for critics of Free Republic
• Comments made by Jerome Corsi on Free Republic
• FreeRepublic Archive at VDARE
• Video of a Freep
• FreeRepublic.com Original FR thread with Buckhead's "Post 47" regarding Rathergate
• PowerLineBlog credits Buckhead for its story
• EnterStageRight.com lays out timeline of Buckhead and Rathergate
• Journalism.nyu.edu on source verification, Dan Rather, and CBS
• History of FR by Jim Robinson
• Americans For Legal Immigration Political Action Committee-Organization advocating the enforcement of current immigration laws, created in response to what ALIPAC believed to be censorship on Free Republic.
• Angelqueen thread on FR, and famous outing - forum initially for those banned over the issue of publicly defending Roman Catholicism
• DUmmie Funnies - this blog is the subject of the most popular "ping list" on Free Republic[22]