freep, freeping

[Clai Rice]

A few more words on 'freeping':

freep's a challenge to look for because it has been frequently used as a
portmanteau or acronym-- as others noted, for the Detroit Free Press (whose
web address is freep.com) and other free press publications and the free
press movement in general, as well as assorted other things like the free
concerts in downtown Brisbane throughout the 1980s.

Grant Barret in Ox Dict Am. Political Slang has Freeper/FReeper from 1998 as
a member of the Free Republic web site; On that site the verb "to freep" has
been used to refer to the activity of going out and protesting liberal
speakers, so that a speaker who suffered such a protest had been
"freeped/FReeped" and somone who showed up to protest was a "freeper". A NY
Daily news article quotes the web site as providing a link: "Freep NY Daily
News should Algore concede poll!" which shifts that usage to refer
specifically to overwhelming an online poll. This specific meaning seems to
have been picked up by non-Free Republic members by 2002 and continues to
gain usage, sometimes extended to overwhelming other kinds of online
comments and counters as well:
------
  from April 8, 2003 The Road to Surfdom blog--
        Congrats Tim, you seem to have gotten freep'ed!
        Mind you this seems like a  better class of wingnuts.
        Funny how they seem to be commenting on something different
        than what you wrote about though.
------
  Mon, 17 Feb 2003 / Mary Rosh says to freep SSRN
        Atrios points us to a Mary Rosh posting at freerepublic.com
        where she urges folks to rig the download counters at the
        Social Science Research Network by downloading a Lott
        paper as frequently as possible.
------

So far, and confirming what Aaron Dinkin writes, I haven't found any use of
"freeper" in the generic sense of anyone who attacks online polls or
comments or message boards with the intent of skewing the outcome.

Clai Rice

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Aaron Dinkin [mailto:dinkin at SAS.UPENN.EDU]
> Sent: Sunday, October 17, 2004 11:40 PM
> Subject: Re: freep, freeping
>
> In the political blogs I read, "freep" has the meaning you
> cite - 'skew
> online polls, either by (one individual) voting multiple times or by
> sending large numbers of like-minded people who otherwise
> wouldn't have
> known about the poll to flood it with votes' - no matter who
> is doing it;
> but the noun "freeper" doesn't mean 'one who freeps'.
> "Freeper" can only
> mean 'a member of freerepublic.com (whether engaged in freeping, as
> defined above, or not)'.
>
> -Aaron J. Dinkin
> Dr. Whom
>