Tesseracts wrote:In December 2014, a reported 80 percent of visits to the Deep Web involved child pornography. In an article full of staggering horror, that last sentence somehow manages to be the most chilling.
I haven't looked into this at all, but claims like this are really suspicious to me. The deep web is huge, and child molesters are not a large portion of the population. The deep web is much, much larger than the surface web.
Could just be mixing up "Deep Web" with "Dark Web". The deep web is just everything not indexed by search engines, and is mostly just databases, corporate intranets, and login sites. This is the deep web that's several times larger than the normal (surface) web. The dark web is Tor hidden service .onion sites.
If the internet is an ocean, the surface web is the top bit where all the dolphins and colourful fish live, the deep web is the vast expanse under that where the nets can't reach, and the dark web is like the Mariana trench. It's so far down it requires special technologies just to visit, and every time you go there you find some new and horrifying abomination.
I think they're claiming that Tor hidden services are 80% child porn. Which might be about right, depending on how you count it. There's a few "big" sites that mostly just traffic in drugs and stuff, like Silk Road and Evolution, then there's thousands of other sites that deliberately try to keep themselves off the wikis and as secret as possible, for obvious reasons.
Also, the dark web naturally selects for nefarious actors, because if you were running a normal (or at least legal) website, you'd probably just run a regular web server. There's a reason this is "thecommentsection.org" and not "7h3c0mm3n753c710n.onion"