The darkweb: a social network anomaly

TL;DR

This paper investigates the darkweb's unique, siloed network structure, revealing most sites do not link to others, and compares it to the WWW to understand its social and topological anomalies.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of darkweb topology, highlighting its dissimilarity to typical social networks and proposing a generalized preferential attachment model to explain its structure.

Findings

87% of darkweb sites do not link to others

Darkweb's structure is highly dissimilar to the WWW

A generalized preferential attachment model partially explains the topology

Abstract

We analyse the darkweb and find its structure is unusual. For example, $ \sim 87 \%$ of darkweb sites \emph{never} link to another site. To call the darkweb a "web" is thus a misnomer -- it's better described as a set of largely isolated dark silos. As we show through a detailed comparison to the World Wide Web (www), this siloed structure is highly dissimilar to other social networks and indicates the social behavior of darkweb users is much different to that of www users. We show a generalized preferential attachment model can partially explain the strange topology of the darkweb, but an understanding of the anomalous behavior of its users remains out of reach. Our results are relevant to network scientists, social scientists, and other researchers interested in the social interactions of large numbers of agents.