Cloaked Websites ©

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. In my latest book, Cyber Racism, I write extensively about how racist groups are using cloaked websites to further their goals to subvert civil rights and affirm white supremacy in covert ways.

Cloaked sites can include a variety of political agendas. Some cloaked sites, such as www.whitehouse.org or www.youthforvolpe.ca which are intended as political 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. 

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.

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One of the research projects I have done about cloaked websites involved asking young people about the way they understand cloaked white supremacist websites they encounter while searching for civil rights information. In one interview, a research participant (age 18) uses a standard search engine to search for information about Martin Luther King.

In less than 3 minutes, she has moves from the search engine to the legitimate sites at the Seattle Times, Stanford University and then to the cloaked Martin Luther King site (published by white supremacists). When she stumbles upon a book cover with a picture of David Duke, she does not recognize him as a former Klan leader. When asked if she recognizes David Duke from his picture on the site, she replies "No, no I don't know who that is. I really don't know that much about the civil rights movement."

Cloaked sites are particularly pernicious for users - whether young or old, experienced or inexperienced on the web - who may not be aware that people disguise hidden political agendas online in fairly sophisticated ways.