ABSTRACT
The campaign to dissuade women from having abortions dates back many decades in the United States. Since the 1960s, some anti-abortion activists have used deceptive tactics to discourage and divert women who are seeking abortions, deny them service, and persuade them to carry their pregnancy to term. Primarily, these sorts of tactics have been deployed through facilities known as “Crisis Pregnancy Centers” (CPCs). More recently these brick-and-mortar facilities and the deceptive practices traditionally associated with them have been joined by online strategies that do not replace, but rather augment, the established methods. In this chapter, I examine the mutually reinforcing practices of online and offline deception used by anti-abortion activists as a way to explore central issues for cyberactivism. I argue that a key struggle for all activists in the digital era is one over “facts.” Ultimately, such battles are about epistemology, or how we know what we say we know. In this political struggle over how we come to know and agree upon facts, those who create cloaked sites rely on the limitations of current, narrow formulations of Internet literacy that contribute the ability to persuade through deception. I conclude the chapter by pointing the way forward to a critically engaged praxis that combines Internet literacy with a critical consciousness of power.
