The Indivisible Truth Brigade has big plans for the new year—Truth Brigade 2.0, we call it. Our first new issue is abortion, but in order to explain how we will do that we first have to dive into a new technique of disinformation, called “cloaked science”. Actually, it has been around for a long time, but the name is new, and I had not heard it before this campaign launched.
Media Manipulation Casebook: Cloaked science
The use of scientific jargon and community norms to cloak or hide a political, ideological, or financial agenda within the appearance of legitimate scientific research.
Sorry, time out.
TL;DR I call this bafflegab, a British term that I learned from Doctor Who. In simpler terms, it means talk meant to confuse you, and put over some kind of rot.
This may include the use of technical language, difficult-to-understand graphs and charts, or seemingly scientific data presented as empirical evidence to lend credibility to the claims being made. Cloaked science may be seeded onto public preprint servers, in data repositories, journals, or publications with lax review standards, through press releases, or by baiting journalists who may not be able to scrutinize the claims thoroughly.
This definition builds upon Jessie Daniel's research on cloaked websites, which she describes as "sites published by individuals or groups who conceal authorship in order to disguise deliberately a hidden political agenda,"1 and is inspired by Sarah Richardson's description of transphobic politics being "cloaked in science."2 Science scholar Timothy Caulfield uses the term “scienceploitation”3 to describe a similar phenomenon—the use of scientific language to mask otherwise unscientific motives (e.g., financial gain).
Note that cloaked science as a tactic is the deliberate use of information masquerading as science and should not be confused with “junk science,” which is a term that has been used to discredit scientific findings, claims, and data as fraudulent or misleading in a similar way that “fake news” can be used to dismiss critical news coverage.4
Cloaked science is a Casebook value under the "Tactics" variable in the code book.
There is a lot to unpack there, and we are only going to get to bits of it today.
We see it in Creationism, bogus race ideology, voodoo economics, Oil and Gaslighting, and pseudoscientific arguments for assorted moral panics, like claiming that science denies LGBTQ rights, CRT, Global Warming, and all the rest, and specifically makes abortion murder.
Oh, and Biden is a race traitor, and therefore all of his works are impeachable offenses. Facts cut no mustard with these.