The Darkest Web Storyville on iplayer

[NotNowFGS]

JFC they walk amongst us....Absolutely must see documentary about paedophilia and the dark web. I think it was uploaded just yesterday - I happened to notice it. Nothing but admiration for the law enforcement officers across the world working in this field. The extent of it is truly jaw droppping.

@Foxybingo32 No! 😄It's just a high degree of personal privacy. Obviously, crims like to be private but so do a lot of law-abiding people. The Dark Web is where you go, not what you use to get there.

When I watched this I was actually dumbfounded that USA created the Dark Web and left it up and open to the public. I am not techy and have no desire to find anything dubious enough to need to go on the dark web, but this seems to be why we can't track them and other gang crimes - why is it still enabled?

Yes, I think this is true.

In some ways, because of technology, I think we are really beginning to reap the consequences of some of the ideas that were promoted during the sexual revolution.

If you don't have a sex life you are bound to be unhappy (unless you have zero sexual desire.)
If fantasies stay in your head they are not harmful.
Thinking about things doesn't change you.
Sex is fundamentally a healthy drive and suppressing your natural sex drive is unhealthy.
Sexual boundaries are prudish. As an individual and in society.
There is no mental/psychological downside to transactional sex as long as there is consent, for anyone involved.
There is no value in practising sexual continence.

I think these were always dangerous wrongheaded ideas, but when you can subject your brain to almost any type of content, for 10 or more hours a day, we see how that can stunt young people, change who they are, create perverts and addicts who will never have a satisfying relationship and are a danger to society.

It;s not just men either, young women are increasingly directly affected as well, more often through print media.

And of course the ones most at risk are the ones who are most vulnerable for other reasons.

It can't be shut down - it's not managed or run by any one centralised authority, it's based on many, many individual servers around the world. In the same way, it is (almost) impossible to shut down the internet completely - you'd need some sort of worldwide unanimous agreement to turn everything off.

There are legitimate - and important - uses for it, such as allowing those in censorious and oppressive regimes to communicate with or read about the outside world (even major sites like the BBC have TOR-accessible web content), allowing military and security forces to communicate globally under the radar etc.

@ElenOfTheWays 18/02/2026 21:07
I am very sorry For what happened when you were four. 💐

I finally finished watching it and, despite it being an emotional rollercoaster, I'm very glad I did. These law enforcement officers are so amazingly tenacious, dedicated and clever in how they go after the evil bastards who do this to children. It's also scary to realise just how much luck is involved sometimes in catching these criminals.

It's fucking ridiculous that there are only 50 people involved in this worldwide police team - I know it's not work suited to a wide range of people but surely governments and law enforcement should prioritise recruiting and funding a higher number or people because this is a very serious (evil) crime and paedophiles should not be able to judge that the odds of getting away with it are in their favour.

I think I was most shocked by the info that offenders are getting younger (men in their 20s), that those who set up the sites on the dark web primarily work in computers, that lack of adequate safeguarding/common sense means these men have access to children, and that these animals feel no shame or remorse for what they inflict on children.