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Cloaked websites: propaganda, cyber-racism and epistemology in the digital era

Hunter College, City University of New York, USA, jdaniels{at}hunter.cuny.edu

This article analyzes cloaked websites, which are sites published by individuals or groups who conceal authorship in order to disguise deliberately a hidden political agenda. Drawing on the insights of critical theory and the Frankfurt School, this article examines the way in which cloaked websites conceal a variety of political agendas from a range of perspectives. Of particular interest here are cloaked white supremacist sites that disguise cyber-racism. The use of cloaked websites to further political ends raises important questions about knowledge production and epistemology in the digital era. These cloaked sites emerge within a social and political context in which it is increasingly difficult to parse fact from propaganda, and this is a particularly pernicious feature when it comes to the cyber-racism of cloaked white supremacist sites. The article concludes by calling for the importance of critical, situated political thinking in the evaluation of cloaked websites.

Key Words: cloaked • cyber-racism • epistemology • propaganda • racist • white supremacist

New Media & Society, Vol. 11, No. 5, 659-683 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1461444809105345


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