Dark Web — still a place for social activism

Dark web is considered as a web space for distribution of child pornography, drugs and firearms. Still, it appears that the citizens who prefer to use the anonymous search engine due to the need of expressing their ideological and religions believes are far more than those who use dark web for traffic of illegal stuff.

Unexpectedly, most of the dark web customers are from already developed countries such as US, UK, India and EU (Uswitch, 2021). Further research indicates that dark web is frequently used for secure drop of websites related to politics or ideologies (22.6%) (Deyan G., 2021). This amount is followed by illicit drugs orders, such as heroin, cocaine and marijuana (8.1%) and illegal financing caused by hacking activities like phishing, skimming and malware (6.3%).

Moreover, the high amount of 50, 000 registered terrorist groups in the web field does not necessarily leads to gun trading. Only 1% of listed categories on the dark web is occupied by firearms.

Hence, the use of Internet space nowadays is still overwhelmed by the need of privacy and anonymity. This demand includes even dark web, where the trade and exchange of illegal services seems to be mostly attempting users who have their freedom of speech but who do not intend to declare their customer preferences publicly.

References:

Guccione, D. “What is the dark web? How to access it and what you’ll find”, CSO, (July 2021), <https://www.csoonline.com/article/3249765/what-is-the-dark-web-how-to-access-it-and-what-youll-find.html> (31.08.2021)

Uswitch. “The dark web: which country is the most intrigued?”, Switch, (June 2021), <https://www.uswitch.com/broadband/dark-web-most-intrigued-countries/> (31.08.2021)

Deyan G. “How Much of the Internet is the Dark Web in 2021?” , Techjury, (August 2021) <https://techjury.net/blog/how-much-of-the-internet-is-the-dark-web/#gref> (31.08.2021)