Democratic Underground
| Website | democraticunderground |
|---|---|
| Alexa rank | 11,936 (2846 in US) (As of 29 November 2015[update]) |
| Launched | January 20, 2001 |
Democratic Underground, also known as DU, is an online community for U.S. Democrats. Its membership is restricted by policy to those who are supportive of the Democratic Party and Democratic candidates for political office. DU was established on January 20, 2001, the day Republican George W. Bush was inaugurated president.
Discussions from posters at DU have drawn criticism. One example of this was the dialog about the 2004 tsunami disaster, in which a few posts explored the possibility of "earthquake weapons". The posts were reported by The New York Times and Fox News. The DU administrators deleted these posts and the threads were locked. The administrators officially disavowed what they called "kooky tsunami conspiracy theories". They added, "One wonders why the author [of the Times article] did not spend five minutes over at Free Republic and instead write an article about how conservatives think the tsunami was some sort of retribution from God, or how Muslims deserved it." The administrators also sent a letter to the Times, which was printed.
Another example is the conspiracy theories revolving around the August 2006 terror plot to blow up airliners between the UK and the US, which received mention in USA Today. Some posters felt that the American government's push to release the announcement of the plot was a conspiracy to bump Joe Lieberman's primary loss out of the news cycle.
The site also saw criticism when, in 2003, a poster explained why he or she wished to see continued bloodshed in Iraq.
The site was also criticized by the online Oregon newspaper Salem-News.com for a thread about a video posted by the newspaper in which a former Israeli soldier described what the newspaper called "the war crimes committed against the Palestinians back in 1948." Because some DU posters criticized the piece, the newspaper wrote that DU had "decided to take a stand for apartheid", although it described another post in the thread (one critical of Israel) as "absolutely correct".
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