By Doug Hanneman
Editor
Thursday, May 15, 2003
The early results from last week's online poll were suspicious. Last Thursday we were asking: Why would more than 100 people respond within the first 24 hours to our reader poll at hutchinsonleader.com, when our typical poll generates fewer than 200 votes all weeklong?
By Monday, we were growing even more suspicious. More than 500 votes had been tallied. And those votes were not following the pattern of people responding to a similar Minnesota Poll question, conducted a week earlier by the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune.
Indeed, our question of the week was controversial, and we expected it
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The trouble is, our poll was showing that more than 80 percent of hutchinsonleader.com readers liked the new law, and said they will feel more safe. By Tuesday, more than 800 people had voted.
Then the truth arrived, via e-mail.
A woman from San Francisco informed us that we had been "FReeped." "The results will not reflect those of your readers," the woman told us. We replied with our thanks and began to look more into this "FReeping" business.
Ends up that "FReeping" takes its name from a right-wing Web site, Free Republic, founded by a Fresno, Calif., Republican. The site is visited by thousands of conservatives every day, and some of the people who hang out on the site call themselves "FReepers."
One of FReepers' favorite pastimes is to vote on Internet polls, such as the one at hutchinsonleader.com. In our case, a FReeper named "Terriergal" posted our entire editorial and told other FReepers that our Web site "also has a poll to FReep!" Terriergal included a link to our poll.
We were in good company on the Free Republic Web site. Among the numerous polls being FReeped on Tuesday included those operated by Fox TV's Bill O'Reilly, CNBC, Newsweek and MSN.
Of course, there's nothing legally wrong with encouraging a group to vote in a poll. It might be morally wrong, but let's face it, online polls are intended to generate discussion, not measure public opinion in any scientific fashion.
Nevertheless, we're disappointed that our poll question was FReeped because now we don't know what our community thinks of the new gun law. We are working to resolve this problem, however. In the near future, we will ask hutchinsonleader.com readers to register the first time they log onto our Web site. If we notice that we're getting abnormal levels of nonlocal traffic on our Web site, we might suspect that we're being FReeped again.
One last item about the FReep poll: Free Republic was sued by the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times a few years ago because it had posted full text articles from those two companies' publications. The Post and Times settled the matter with Free Republic, which agreed to pay nominal damages to the plaintiffs -- $10,000 -- and agreed to not post anymore material from Times and Post publications.
Free Republic doesn't think much of our nation's copyright laws. Terriergal, the FReeper who posted our editorial online, apparently concurs with Free Republic's position. We believe Terriergal and Free Republic violated a law that protects all Americans involved in publishing newspapers, music, literature and similar works.
Some say FReepers are harmless. But Joyce Slayton, in a column for the San Francisco Chronical's Web Site, sfgate.com, writes that FReepers have their dark side. She's tried to talk with FReepers, but most have been unwilling to talk to her. And she's talked to the group's observers, including one who described FReepers as having tapped into a "certain cultural zeitgeist, an angry streak running through conservatives pushed to their limits during the Clinton years."
Slayton says she admires the group for their passionate political views and their willingness to express them. We can agree with that. Most Free Republic followers are probably law-abiding and civic conscious.
But when a lunatic fringe of this politically motivated group covertly drowns out the views of a community that they never heard of, it does matter. In future instances like this, their views won't merit any attention.