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Free Republic

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Free Republic is an American Internet forum and activist site for conservatives. 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 pay the salaries of Jim Robinson and the staff.

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:

  • 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 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 consdered online freeps.
  • Freepathon is a quarterly fundraising event, aimed to collect donations for running the site and raise sufficient funds to support Free Republic's owner.
  • 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. 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. Numerous examples of this practice exist, as any competent search for "Freeploader" on the Free Republic website will show.

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 (see below), 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 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 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. Comparitively, 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. [1] [2]

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 gun control, lowering taxes, reducing personal welfare, ending abortion, and opposing what its members consider to be "the gay agenda," particularly same-sex marriage. 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. Divisive issues include evolution, immigration control, free trade, state authority vs. individual rights, and the legalization of soft drugs.

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 Iraq or Afghanistan war, 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 is blocked by several leading child-protection filters for containing hate 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 "Rathergate," the controversy surrounding CBS News' use of allegedly forged documents during the 2004 US presidential campaign. Nineteen minutes after its broadcast began, Free Republic 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, who received national media attention), 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 broke the story [3]. 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 [4], 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, Jerome Corsi, co-author of the controversial and influential book Unfit for Command, apologized in the national media for racist, 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 [5]. 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.

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

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