What is the Deep Web?
When reading news online you may have hard of certain parts of the internet that contain illegal content. Typically this is referring to the dark web, where you can find stolen credit card numbers, SSNs, child porn, and pretty much whatever else you can come up with. This is in Tor, and is typically hard to get to without already being associated with it in the real world.
Then there is the deep web, which coincidentally is also sometimes a gateway into the dark web. The deep web is not hidden on tor, encrypted over 3 hops of network connections. The deep web is in the same internet that we all use everyday. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Snapchat, etc.. It exists among everyday people and depending on the platform you can typically find almost everything you can on the dark web. Due to how the deep web works, one can even find it by accident. Let me explain.
How Do You Get To The Deep Web?
The way to get into the deep web varies by each social media platform. It requires you to also have a solid understanding of how the platform works. I will use Twitter for example in this post.
In this post you can see at the bottom a menu of options.
Here we have from left to right: comments, retweets, hearts, and share. When you click on a tweet, these options expand outwards to look like this:
Here you can see that it explains what they are, retweets, quote tweets, and likes. From here you can dive deeper into who is interacting with the post. To see what people are saying about the post, you would click “quote tweets” as these have comments attached.
This is one way you could begin to enter the deep web for Twitter. Each comment gives a description of the person and their opinions on the tweet. Each person is a potential follow, but typically you would visit their page and do the same to their tweets until you find more of what you are looking for based on the “profile” of the people from say the media. The more you do this and the deeper you go the more you will find the deep web.
So What Does the Dark Web Look Like?
The dark web looks exactly like your normal social media platform as you would use it everyday, except the content is more extreme. For example, while it wasn’t on Twitter, I was able to find drugs, fake IDs, guns, hostile porn related hypnosis, and child porn among a large group of apparently underage kids accounts through friend suggestions that I entered through a person’s, who was coincidentally gay, account being added as a friend. I can’t speak to whether Twitter has this content as easy as it was to find on the other platforms, and I think Elon Musk is committed to ridding it of this content, but it is a constant and never ending battle without AI scanning each uploaded post (which is insanely expensive).
Conclusion
The problem with the deep web is that it isn’t just criminals, it’s kids too. These kids, typically innocent, are just good with technology and have found the platform’s dark side. What the platforms themselves don’t even want you to find. This leads, in my opinion, to school shootings, becoming an Onlyfans kid at 18, non-binary or beyond LGBT+ (gender dysphoria) through what has had hypnosis to cause it, and more.
On another note, there was a movie published in 2015 called Deep Web. This movie essentially serves as propaganda (to me) as it is referring to the Dark Web – which is behind the Tor Network and not “deep” in the social media platforms. Dark is the definition used when light is cut off, deep still has light. ICANN, the domain name system, is light in this case.
Regardless, here is the video if you want to watch it about the DARK web.
