Ride the Lightning

80% of Dark Web Visits Involve Child Porn

January 6, 2015

What a depressing headline to start the new year. But this story from Wired was one of the first I read in 2015. After a six month study of Tor's hidden services, which comprise the largest chunk of the hidden services that make up the Dark Web, the conclusion was that over 80% of visitors sought out child pornography sites.

Sure, there are gambling sites, bitcoin related sites, drug forums, contraband markets and even whistle-blowing websites. But they are dwarfed by the visits to child porn sites. Tor's Executive Director Roger Dingledine points out that Tor's hidden services represent only two percent of the total traffic over its anonymizing network. And he correctly observes that human rights activists use hidden services to access Facebook or to blog anonymously. But for any good that is done on the Dark Web, it is clearly dwarfed by the evil that resides there.

The article is worth reading to absorb the details of the study, possible factors that impacted the results, etc. But taken as a whole, the question of "How dark is the Dark Web?" has been answered.

It is very dark indeed.

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