coalpot

Reflections of Ch. 8 – Searching for Civil Rights, Finding Supremacy: Adolescents Making Sense of Cloaked Websites from the book  Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights by Jesse Daniels

In this chapter, Jesse Daniels reports on a study that he conducted using mixed methods in which he analyzed the ability of a small number of racially and ethnically diverse youth in America to detect and interpret cloaked white supremacy websites. He was curious to find out whether this generation of young people, whose lives are inevitably interlocked with digital media, is savvy enough to identify racial messages and images masked as educational information on the Internet. “This shift in how young people look for and find information has a number of far-reaching consequences about digital media and learning. Race and racism are part of this new digital era in ways both predictable and unexpected,” Daniels writes (p.141).  

The lack of research on the topic with a specific focus on web users was also a major inspiration for Daniels’ project.  Although he singles out the work of Lee and Leets as an exception, he notes, “When it comes to empirical explorations of how people find, read, and interpret extremist rhetoric on racist websites there is scant research” (p.140).

Daniels' research yielded interesting results. One of the significant findings was the method that these youths tend to use to validate and select credible websites. This process of selection begins from the search process. “When asked about how they evaluate the search-engine results, most said that they relied on the order that search results appeared on the screen as a valid and reliable way to evaluate whether or not a site was trustworthy” (Daniels, 2009, p.141).

After reading this, I could not help reflect on the power of meta-search engines and even popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, to influence the validation and popularization of certain types of knowledge. Daniels further heightened my anxiety over this vexing thought by stating, “In fact, because of the way Google’s algorithm works, it is possible to intentionally manipulate the ranking of a site by linking to a page using consistent anchor text. This is commonly referred to as Google bombing and has been used a number of times as a form of political critique of the Bush administration” (p.142).  In this particular case, political activists anchored the biography of President Bush with the text miserable failure, which brought up information on the president as the first result for a search of that phrase.

Daniels’ study also found that youths are predisposed to associate different values to the veracity and reliability of information from certain websites depending on the suffix of associative URLs. Analyzing the feedback from one of his respondents, he concludes, “The fact that URLs ending in .com are more common leads this participant to conclude that the less common –org websites are more trustworthy” (p.144).  Daniels traces this habit to the pedagogy of Internet literacy skills-based instructions at various levels of educational institutions. He cautions that perpetuating this value judgment has an inherent problem.  “While it is possible to read the URL of a site and sometimes ascertain where the site is hosted or who is sponsoring it, it is also possible for the site creator to disguise the nature of a site using a clever or nefarious domain name registration” (Daniels, 2009, p.144).

This was exactly what one of his subjects found in the study that required them to search for information on the Nobel Prize Laureate, African American icon, and American national hero, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The respondent came across a site with the URL www.martinlutherking.org, believing it to be an official cite of King’s legacy, only to later learn that the site belonged to one of America’s most militant white supremacists. “In the case of the martinlutherking.org site, the cloaking of white supremacist political and ideological goals began when Don Black registered the domain name and launched the site in 1998” (Daniels, 2009, p.145).

As Daniel explains, these sites prey on the ignorance of their targeted audience who are uneducated about much of their country’s history, especially on racial issues.  “For example, the effectiveness  of cloaked domain names, such as www.martinlutherking.org or www.AmericanCivilRightsReview.org rests in part on the racial naiveté of their, target audience, particularly a white audience unaccustomed to taking racial matters into account” (p.152).

These cloaked sites intersperse genuine historical data with propaganda and racist ideologies to distort and confuse historical facts. On the website www.martinlutherking.org, there is information on books by Dr. King, but there are also books touting racial hatred and supremacy alongside them, with no contextual information explaining the distinctions. Reflecting on the experience of one of his research subjects, Daniels writes, “In less than three minutes from when she began using a search engine to look for information about Dr. King, this young woman has selected a cloaked white supremacist site and is reading a page that contains the views of David Duke, an avowed white supremacists, yet she does not recognize that this site is cloaked” (p.146).

According to the study, fraudulent websites may also dupe young surfers with visual cues. The subjects of Daniels’ research admitted to relying on photographic evidence and graphic designs to judge the validity of the sites that emerged from their search. Daniel explains this, noting, “Visual images are not simply decoration for a site but carry messages, convey meaning, and suggest connotations for these participants (p.148). However, relying too heavily on visual cues can be misleading. The proliferation and affordability of digital software that makes it possible to alter images in the most sophisticated ways, which easily escapes the untrained eye , means that web users should always critically, and perhaps skeptically, attend to photographs on the web.

The youths in Daniels’ study referred to a “professional look” to adjudicate on the believability of websites; however, it is also precarious and dangerous to associate a site’s professional look to its credibility and virtuosity. Daniels laments, “If the cloaked websites under investigation here made use of “more professional” Web-design graphics and layout, it would make them much more difficult for these young people to distinguish their illegitimacy” (p.149).

So what then does Daniels propose? Well, he advocates developing among American youth a critical posture to race both offline and online. “A number of the young people in the study evaluated websites in a way that reflected a lack of critical race consciousness and it made evaluating the sites more difficult” (p.149). I agree with Daniels that it is only by inculcating a critical mind and attitude to racial issues in all aspects of life will such persons avoid the insidious and deceptive online projects to destabilize and discredit the authenticity and legitimacy of racial and ethnic history and heritage.

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Daniels, J. (2009). Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.