Cloaked websites are published by individuals or groups who conceal authorship in order to deliberately disguise a hidden political agenda. In this way, these sites are similar to previous versions of print media propaganda, such as "black," "white" and "grey" propaganda.
Cloaked sites can include political sites, such as www.whitehouse.org or www.youthforvolpe.ca which are intended as satire. Or, websites can be cloaked to conceal a hidden political agenda connected to reproductive politics, such as www.teenbreaks.com which appears to be a reproductive health website. In fact, the website is a disguise for pro-life propaganda, much like brick-and-mortar "Women's Health Clinics" which conceal the fact that staff are pro-life counselors who intend to prevent women from choosing abortions. Cloaked websites can also conceal hidden racial agendas that seek to subvert civil rights and affirm white supremacy. The emergence of cloaked websites at the same time young people are relying on search engines rather than libraries to find information raises important questions about digital media, knowledge and epistemology.
One of the main projects I worked on while at ICTE was researching the way young people understand cloaked white supremacist websites they encounter while searching for civil rights information. In one (videotaped) interview, a research assistant asks a participant to "search for information about Martin Luther King."
At first, the participant navigates to a legitimate site hosted by Stanford University, then to another legitimate site hosted by the Seattle Times. Within about 1 minute, she encounters the "cloaked" site hosted by a white supremacist. She sees a book cover with a picture of David Duke, but does not recognize him as a former Klan leader, and then says that she "doesn't know that much about the civil rights movement."
The term "cloaked" to refer to a white supremacist website first appeared in this article by Ray & Marsh (2001). I have adopted this term and expanded it to include a number of different types of cloaked websites in a number of forthcoming publications, including the chapter in the MacArthur volume on Learning Race & Ethnicity, from MIT Press (2007) and in a forthcoming article in the journal New Media & Society.
