Sexual content sites on the dark web

Having reviewed most of the types of content and activity present on the dark web, we could not leave out the dark web’s sexual content sites.

Important clarifications:

– We deal here with subjects that are difficult but unavoidable on the dark web: the dark web’s adult sites. Sensitive readers should stop here.

– For obvious reasons, this article contains very few screenshots.

– This article is not intended to promote dark web sites, only to describe the types of site that can be found there.

Searches on the dark web

These sites account for a far from negligible share of the Tor network’s active domains, and for a very large part of the content consulted. Statistics suggest that 13 to 20% of searches carried out on the clear web are for pornographic content; to our knowledge no such statistics exist for the dark web, but a brief look at the most popular searches on the OnionLand Search engine gives an idea of pornography’s weight within this perimeter.

The most common searches on the OnionLand Search engine

If we confine ourselves to the searches listed under the letter A, 21 of the 32 search expressions (65%) relate to pornography. For the letter B, the figure ‘falls’ to 56%. A random sampling gives us: letter F (59%), letter K (59%), letter N (47%), letter S (59%), letter Z (38%). The letter Y even reaches 97%, with searches beginning with ‘young’. The overwhelming majority of the pornographic searches recorded by OnionLand Search do in fact concern child sexual abuse material. This over-representation in search expressions mirrors the weight of such sites within the overall mass of sexual content sites on the Tor network.

Child sexual abuse sites

These sites make up almost all of the sexual content present on the Tor network. Counting current and now defunct sites together, we count close to 25,000 domains holding child sexual abuse material (CSAM), or 7% of the total volume of onion sites detected since 2014. Some of these domains are subject to mass mirroring, without it being possible to determine whether the mirrors are authentic. Among all the sites we monitor with our search engine Aleph Search Dark, 25 domains are replicated more than 100 times each, some reaching almost 1,000 mirrors. New domains appear very regularly: we detect new sites every week.

The whole spectrum of child sexual abuse is covered on the dark web. Victims are female or male, and range from infants to adolescents. A tiny minority of sites confine themselves to content at the margins of legality: photos of clothed children, photos of faces…

For the most part, child sexual abuse sites on the Tor network contain photos and videos of children being raped. The most extreme sites combine rape with torture (a practice known as Hurtcore).

We note that some of these sites apply a distinctly perverse strategy to gain maximum visibility in dark web search engines. We have observed pages saturated with keywords, intended to push the sites up the results.

One page on one of these sites contained more than 18,000 keywords, a significant share of which had nothing to do with child sexual abuse. Some sites even contain pages made up solely of a list of every country in the world; that way, a dark web search engine user running a simple search on a country name, with no intention of viewing child sexual abuse material, may see links to these sites among their results.

Sites connected to the clear web

The Tor network features the occasional mirror of a clear web site. Sexy Madama and Escort-Ireland each had a Tor V2 mirror, unreachable since Tor moved to V3 addresses.

Tor mirror of the Escort Ireland site

TubXporn also appears to have a mirror on Tor, but we note a definite difference between the clear web version and the one on the dark web.

TubXporn on the clear web

TubXporn on the dark web

The Tor mirror of TubXporn carries an advertising banner leading to the child sexual abuse site LoliPorn. Without further investigation we cannot determine whether this is an authentic mirror controlled by the original TubXporn site, or one of the parasitic mirrors typical of the dark web, whose purpose would be to generate traffic to a child sexual abuse site.

Other pornographic and erotic sites bridge the clear and dark webs. Some consist of clear web content republished, such as the site devoted to the Suicide Girls community, while others simply list links to pornographic sites, such as Adult Porn Links.

Home page of the Adult Porn Links site

Finally, a number of sites sell hacked user accounts for commercial clear web pornographic sites, such as Porn Market or Your Porn Hacker.

Home page of the Porn Market site

Home page of the Your Porn Hacker site

Sexual content sites specific to the dark web

Beyond child sexual abuse sites, the Tor network hosts sites with no exact equivalent on the clear web. Very occasionally these are innocuous, such as Flat Chest Girls or a site devoted to the camel toe. There was also a site called Amputee Porn which, as its name indicates, was devoted to content featuring actresses with one or more amputated limbs.

More commonly, the content made available differs not so much in nature as in degree. The fetishes and paraphilias present on the dark web are also present on the clear web, but in a less extreme form.

The site Deep Crushing is a good illustration of this difference between the clear and dark webs. There are clear web sites wholly or partly devoted to the practice of crushing. This paraphilia consists essentially in fantasising about women crushing objects underfoot. Clear web sites confine themselves to publishing photos and videos of women crushing and destroying fruit, toys or other inanimate objects.

Deep Crushing, by contrast, crosses a line that clear web sites cannot cross without falling into illegality: what is crushed under the ‘actresses’’ feet is no longer inanimate objects but live animals of various sizes (insects, slugs, lobsters, fish, but also rabbits, rats…). Here, then, what separates clear web from dark web content is a threshold of intensity rather than of nature.

Home page of the Deep Crushing site

In the same vein, the furry fetish, a practice at the confluence of manga, cosplay and zoophilia, is very widespread on clear web discussion spaces. Furry fetish sites on the Tor network also cross a line, and some may host content described as Guro (a Japanese word for the gory and the macabre).

The Guro furry fetish is thus not limited to drawings or costumes; it brings in dead animals or animal parts as sexual objects.

The clear web also has sites offering more or less authentic and realistic videos of rapes or murders. It is to be feared that the content available on the dark web is a priori far more real, even if the proliferation of mirrors of this kind of site raises the question of a possible trap.

Home page of the Rape And Murder site, replicated across more than 1,100 mirrors

The Tor network also carries a number of sites devoted to zoophilia proper, outside furry discussion networks. It is not unusual for the content on offer to include photos or videos involving children; the junction between child sexual abuse and zoophilia can even be the subject of dedicated sites, such as the evocatively named Zoo School.

Most of the dark web’s sexual content sites hosted on Tor are therefore sites whose content could not be published on the clear web without exposure to prosecution in many countries. Their presence is the unfortunately very high price of the anonymity and freedom of expression that the Tor network protects.