Cloaked websites represent epistemological challenges where in most cases, they promote cyber racism on ethnicity. They are suspected to be recruited by white supremacist groups. Efforts to identify them failed because one must identify a pacific website. Cloaked websites use popular search engines to get civil rights leads, such as Martin Luther King (Daniels 2009). The essay will describe how cloaked websites and social media pages are used to pass hidden political agendas.
Cloaked websites are defined as websites published by individuals or groups of people who conceal authorship or use feigned legitimacy to disguise hidden political agendas intentionally. The word cloaked first appeared in Ray was d Marsh’s article in 2001. In this article, the authors refer to Martin Luther king. The term cloaked website was used to include other sites. Other recognized terms such as ‘counterfeit, ‘Hoax, and ‘Urban legend.’ Such terms describe the sites that have inadequate conceptual clarity, and they also form the elements of hidden political agendas (Daniel 2009). Cloaked websites can be compared to past printed and electronic media propaganda, where the authorship and purpose of publishing were obscured. According to Solley and Nicholas (2006), there are three types of propaganda; new media and society, white propaganda, and grey propaganda. The propagandists use printed media and websites to share their views with as many people as possible. Many websites represent a variety of political views; white propaganda, black and grey propaganda. Cloaked websites are used to conceal their purposes and authorship.
Cloaked websites are detected by fake authorship. The information about the author and the necessary research determines the authorships in some cloaked sited such as those that referred to Martin Luther King. They represent the site’s host at the bottom of the page, but when you scroll down, they critically create a racial, political awareness. Such authorship is always hidden from the views. The cloaked site uses legitimate links as a source of their information, for example, yahoo, to obfuscate their agendas (Daniel 2009). So, they aim to represent their trust by ensuring that the readers can easily access the, for example, Martin Luther King’s case, they calmed to know some undiscovered facts about him. Cloaked websites invoke cyber racism where the authors claim to tell the truth on racial equality. The mechanisms used by cloaked websites undermine civil rights, values, and racial equality. They question how the readers evaluate the claims about civil rights and social justice the modern society. The search engine is another feature that plays a significant role in the use of cloaked websites. It promotes the epistemology where the editors and publishers grant legitimacy to these websites. Using hyperlinks and search engines direct readers from one site to another and influence the information they encounter online.
Consequently, this mechanism encourages the authors to use caked websites to undermine the value and racial equality. The young generation is affected by cloaked websites in a great way. There are more influences to use the search engine than the library information conveyed about civil rights. A such, cyber racism gets the opportunity to undermine racial equality by claiming to have political truths (Daniel 2009).
Cloaked social media pages are used in the popular social network sites by medial social companies such a Facebook to share hateful content. They influence the user to use share hateful information and political agenda, which lead to epistemological challenges. Social media network sites such as p-pseudo-scientific websites, forms, and online journals also use tactful strategies to take advantage of active users (Daniel 2009). They are also aimed to achieve political goals by claiming to use valid information that influences the readers’ perception on racial matters. Cloaked social media pages use a specific and static form of websites. Their main purposes are to present the content using truthful mechanisms while they conceal e authorship. Cloaked social media sites use personal profiles and personal network to display credibility and trust to the readers. The posts and the origin of the posts, comments and likes reshape the pages’ identity. Cloaked social medial pages created a public or semi-public profile, make unknowns come on, and monitor the connections. Unlike cloaked websites, cloaked social media pages are temporary. They only exist in an interactive process but can be deleted upon violations of social network terms and conditions.
The cloaked website can conceal different political agendas. A popular cloaked site is known as www.gwbusj.com was used in campaigning for Bush’s presidency. The activists involved were referred to as ‘Yes Men, who were considered in the landscape of actual politics. The activist drew attention by challenging necessary interventions in the USA. The cloaked site used defective strategies to influences their web uses. In particular, they employed a similar logo to the official campaigns to have the same Uniform Resource Locator (URL). After the campaign was launched, the cloaked website was identified and reported to clarify its policy issues. It was ironic that the cloaked website was used in political issues and other concepts such as corporate responsibility (Daniel 2009). Also. The croaked website created by Yes Men activists used the website for anti-globalization on activism activists. The websites used the World Trade Organization (WTO)official logo, and therefore they could not be identified. The cloaked Webster was used to campaign against the globalization policies used by WTO. The activists also used the cloaked websites to counter the critics of corporal practice and give an appearance of grass-roots support. In another instance, cloaked websites were created when launching working families for Wal-Mart. Such a mechanism helped it to reduce the criticisms that were spread globally about its business practices. The cloaked websites aimed to foster open and honest dialogue among the elected officials. Using such cloaked websites was a cynical move by Walmart as it showed that its customers are sophisticated to be subdued with fake news (Daniel 2009). The company aimed to ensure that there is little resistance
Some cloaked websites used different tactics to pass valid political information on the public as it was the cloaked websites used during Bush presidential campaigns. Thus, some cloaked websites pass good propaganda while others pass fake information to the target users. For instance, Walmart used the cloaked website to deceive their customers and change their pat business reputation, which was bad propaganda.
Cloaked websites may display different agendas, positive or negative. It is complex to distinguish between bad and good propaganda conveyed by cloaked websites. The authors use legitimate sources to support their claims regarding cyber-racism, cloaked sites challenging the foundations that people know about racism racial equality. Cloaked websites illustrate some test-market and public reaction methods using rhetoric intended to appeal to the public more broadly. Cyber-racism is aimed to undermine racial ethnicity by justifying their ideologies in fats that have been accepted in the past.
Certainly, various factors have led to increased domination of hidden agendas in the cloaked websites. It was, therefore, necessary to find more rational and critical means to discern cloaked websites from legitimate websites. The process to achieve this calls upon digital literacy skills, web credibility, critical thinking skills, and locating the author’s information within the site’s political and social context.
The existence of cloaked websites led to important epistemology concerns. To differentiate legitimate sites from cloaked sites, the decision requires understanding the political and social context from where the websites originate (Daniel 2009). This is the crucial step in identifying cloaked websites. Other digital methods to identify cloaked should be created as the cloaked creators are more careful. The usual strategy on es adverse to look at the URL is now common, and authors of cloaked websites are more careful to ensure that they appear legitimate. There is a need to effectively and accurately challenge cyber racism by using alternative epistemology, which requires livid resources, ethics, and reasons for the interconnection of essential elements to assess the claims from cloaked sites. The alternative epistemology should involve the validation of knowledge, process, and ideas. There should be an imperative apparatus to evaluate the knowledge and the claims that promote ethical inequality. As we employ digital literacy skills, there is a need to develop other literacies of racism, anti-racism, and social justice.
References
Daniels, J. (2009). Cloaked websites: propaganda, cyber-racism, and epistemology in the
digital era. New Media & Society, 11(5), 659-683.
