Free Republic |
Free Republic is an United States Internet forum and activist site for conservativism. It bills itself as the premier online 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.
=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 caused controversy due to the apparent copyright violation, which led to a lawsuit whose settlement is discussed later in this article.
==Specific terminology== The Free Republic subculture developed several specific expressions:
=Social organization and events=
There are local chapters within Free Republic which are organized through Ping list 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. Jim Robinson travels all over the country to make appearances at chapter rallies.
=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.
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 list, 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 somone replies to one of their posts.
Alexa, a company that ranks the Internet s 100,000 most visited sites, and measures their traffic in users per million, estimates that Free Republic reaches approximately five to six hundred users per million each day, and ranks at number 1,560 of all sites. Comparatively, by Alexa Internet s estimation, Wikipedia.org reaches 11 to 12 thousand per million each day and ranks at 53, Yahoo reaches 300,000 and ranks at no. 1, and Google reaches 220,000 and ranks at no. 3. Visits at Free Republic tend to spike sharply upward during election seasons and when news breaks which captures its users interest. [http://www.seobook.com/archives/000944.shtml] [http://calacanis.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000310021602/]
=Discussion=
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 insults directed at 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 canididates for various elected offices, ending .
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 (usually liberal) views 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 an opinion 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. Another common term is zot which refers to the banning of a user for posting unwelcome material. The moderators often remove or ban posters who criticize Israel, the 2003 invasion of Iraq or U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, etc., from its discussion boards. Material criticising the administration of President George W. Bush from a left-wing 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.
The site has been criticized based on allegations of hateful speech regarding certain groups of people, such as liberals, homosexuals, and Muslims.
=Influencing polls=
The influencing of online polls by Free Republic s members is a common practice. Known as freeping a poll, the practice is not unique to the Free Republic forums and is employed by many other activist websites of all political stripes. It involves posting a message thread directing members to vote en masse in an online poll and including a link to the poll, particularly those on television network or newspaper websites, with the intended goal of significantly affecting the final outcome. Cf. astroturfing.
=Notoriety during 2004 Presidential campaign=
Free Republic is credited in helping to break [http://powerlineblog.com/archives/007917.php/], 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 Well, that opened the floodgates. The discussion quickly spread across the Internet, and eventually to the Drudge Report and the Associated Press. The original thread can still be viewed at Free Republic; however, it has been locked for archival purposes.
Also during that campaign, , 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.
=Lawsuit and settlement=
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.
=Influence=
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.
=See also=
*Killian documents *Ping list
=External links=
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