The Darknet and suicide

Highlights

• We document the nature and accessibility of suicide-related information available on the TOR (The Onion Browser) Darknet.

• Using eight specialized TOR Darknet search engines, we analyzed the content of the first 30 sites to emerge using the keywords “suicide” and “suicide methods”.

• Over half of the sites proposed by the search engines were outdated, inaccessible or not containing content pertinent to suicide or suicide methods.

• We found no suicide prevention dedicated site hosted on the TOR Darknet.

• TOR provides access to a few very active pro-suicide chat boards that merit to be better understood.

Abstract

Context

The Internet contains both public content (“Surface Web”), and private content (“Deep Web”) sometimes hosted on exclusive networks (“Darknets”) only accessible using dedicated software such as TOR (The Onion Router). This software makes it almost impossible to identify its users. Information media have reported on suicide-related aspects of Darknets, for example when poisons that can be used to kill oneself are offered for sale (Le Garff et al., 2016) when users discuss ways to kill oneself in anonymous forums (Ferrara, 2016; Franceschi-Bicchierai, 2015) and suicides that follow bullying or “doxing” (online divulgation without consent of intimate personal information) (Bartlett, 2015). Several recent studies have analyzed the nature of suicide content on the Surface Web, but to date, there have been no systematic investigations of suicidal content available on Darknets.

Objectives

The object was to document the nature and accessibility of suicide-related information available on the TOR Darknet or via the TOR software.

Methods

We replicated the methodology used by Biddle et al. (2008, 2016) in their studies of the Surface Web, using TOR on the Darknet. We identified and chose nine search engines used on the TOR Darknet: TORCH the TOR search engine, Notevil, Ahmia, Candle, Hidden Wiki, Darknet (onion.link), Duckduckgo and Grams. Two research assistants independently coded the first 30 results of searches using the keywords, “suicide” and “suicide methods”.

Results

There were 476 “hits” in the search for “suicide” and “suicide method” using TOR, with fewer sites dedicated to suicide (4%), compared to the Surface Web (23.1%) (Biddle et al., 2016). Over half of the sites proposed by the TOR search engines (252, 52.9%) were outdated, inaccessible or not containing content pertinent to suicide or suicide methods. Several of the TOR search engines provided access to forums (“chat boards”) where suicide was a topic (70, 14.8%). These were usually pro-suicide, are blocked or filtered by most of the Surface Web engines (e.g. Google).

Discussion

Persons concerned with suicide prevention should conduct further investigations of pro-suicide forums that are accessible using TOR and their users, comparing them with the Surface Web. New strategies to prevent suicide may need to be developed for Darknets.

Introduction

A Darknet is a part of the Internet that is not accessible by conventional search engines, such as Google. It is a closed (“overlay”) network, available to all internet users who install specific software, such as The Onion Router (TOR), Freenet or I2P. This paper presents a study that describes information on suicide available on the Darknet accessible via the TOR software, its nature and its accessibility to the general public. Before presenting our study, we describe the TOR Darknet in relation to the Surface Web, and studies to date on internet suicide content.

Many recent studies have documented suicide content available on the public part of the internet (Biddle et al., 2012, Thoër, 2013). Most of the studies describe content available on social media (Robinson et al., 2015) or all content found using conventional search engines, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo (Durkee et al., 2011). Until now, there are no studies on the suicide content available on other ‘hidden’ parts of the internet.

The expression “Deep Web” was first used in 1994 to designate that part of the web that was not referenced by conventional search engines and not accessible using traditional methods (Bergman, 2001, Gupta and Bhatia, 2014, He et al., 2007). It contrasts with the public part of the Internet (the “Surface Web”), and was sometimes referred to, in the literature, as the “Invisible Web” (Sherman and Price, 2001) or the “hidden web” (He et al., 2007). The content of the Deep Web is either not indexed or poorly indexed by traditional search engines: the pages are sometimes voluntarily not referenced and there are pages that are proprietary (they can only be accessed by identified people who are authorized for access), as well as having changing dynamically-generated content (in contrast with content where the pages are static and unchanging) (Sherman and Price, 2001). In other words, the Deep Web contains information that could be considered to be sensitive, such as information belonging to corporations, private content, and banking information (Rouse, 2016). Because of the often intentionally hidden nature of the content on the Deep Web, it is difficult to describe and access its content (Chen, 2011, Madhavan et al., 2009, Sherman and Price, 2001).

Within the Deep Web and the surface web, there are organized networks called “Darknets”, which are accessible only with dedicated software. The most commonly used are TOR (The Onion Router), then Freenet and I2P. TOR is a free open source software, giving access to a network that is consists of over 3000 chains of volunteer-run servers (Biryukov et al., 2013, Masterson, 2015). In 2017, TOR had over 2 million users, including 40,000 in Canada, 90,000 in France and 400,000 in the United States (TOR Project, 2017). TOR, like Freenet and I2P, circumvents any form of censorship by providing relative anonymity to users so that restrictions imposed on search engines by government regulators can be avoided (Thill, 2014). Censorship and identification of users is circumvented by a sophisticated encryption platform that allows users to navigate anonymously on TOR-exclusive sites (or “services”) and regular public websites (Moore and Rid, 2016). For this reason, TOR has a reputation for being used to obtain illegal services and of supporting illegal trafficking in goods, such as arms sales, illicit drugs, exchange of cryptocurrencies, and allowing access to non-referenced sites such as the now closed service : “Silk Road” (Broséius et al., 2016; Mireault et al., 2016).

Bartlett (2015) observed that there is confusion in both publications and the public concerning the distinction between the terms “Darknet”, “Deep Web” and “Dark Web”. These terms are sometimes used interchangeably, although one can make an important distinction between them. The term “Dark Web” usually refers to all activity and content that is illegal, morally questionable or ambiguous, that one finds on the internet (Cohen-Almagor, 2015). The dark web can be considered a “catch-all” term that can be used to describe all internet content, on the surface and on the Deep Web, that is shocking, disturbing or controversial (Bartlett, 2015). The term dark web is often associated with the hidden part of the internet, such as criminal and morally questionable activity obscured from surveillance and regulation (Cohen-Almagor, 2015). Media attention to illegal drug-trafficking using TOR and stories about violent and disturbing content on the Darknet have led to the false belief that many people hold that the Deep Web and the Darknet are one and the same, called the ‘dark web”. However, the Deep Web and the Darknet can be defined by their technical characteristics, whereas the term Dark Web is a normative concept. For clarity, this study will solely focus on the TOR Darknet and will not use the terms “Deep Web” or “Dark Web”.

In summary, “Surface Web”, “Deep Web”, “Darknet” and “Dark Web” are all part of the Internet. These different designations are not always clearly defined and sometimes overlap. However, each concept has its specificities in terms of 1. the extent of retrievability of their content by regular search engines, 2. the presumed proportion of illegal content, 3. the level of censorship. Table 1 describes each of these concepts based on these three characteristics.

The Deep Web differs from the Surface Web particularly in terms of retrievability. It is more difficult to access the Deep Web since it consists for the most part of unindexed, weakly indexed or strictly private content (e.g. emails). It also contains illegal content (e.g. drug-related). The amount of censorship of the Deep Web is also lower because companies and governments exert more effort to censor the "accessible" content of the surface web.

A Darknet is characterized by a low level of retrievability of its content and a potentially higher level of illegality than the Surface Web. The level of censorship is presumably low, given the nature of the software and the technical challenges for its implementation. The Dark Web also has the highest level of illegal content. This is due to the fact that most of the definitions of Dark Web are morally-based and refer broadly to all the illegal content that can be found on the Internet. Dark Web content can be found on a Darknet, which belongs to a Deep Web or a Surface Web website.

It is worth noting that a website can be simultaneously found on the surface web, the Deep Web, the Darknet and the Dark Web at a given time, and eventually it could be eliminated by censorship, legal procedures or to migrate content from the surface web to the Darknet, the Dark Web or the Deep Web.

It should be noted that this way of delimiting these areas of the internet is conceptual and aims to help the reader better understand this research on the level of accessibility and the nature of the content relating to suicide and suicide methods in the TOR darknet.

From time to time, there have been media reports on suicides which were said to be associated with content on the Darknet, such as suicides by ingesting poisons purchased on cryptomarkets (Le Garff et al., 2016), forums where people encourage others to kill themselves, provide information about suicide methods and suicides following bullying or “doxing” (Ferrara, 2016, Franceschi-Bicchierai, 2015). However, we are not aware of any published systematic study of suicide content on Darknets.