Featured Image Credit: Tiktok/AustinVRO
The 'Dark Web' is a pretty scary place, and one the vast majority of us will never enter.
This unregulated and hard-to-access part of the internet requires a specific browser to even get into it, and is well-known for playing host to a whole lot of shady activity.
From drug deals to explicit content, it's where some people go to do illegal things online, as exposed by TikToker @austinvro - who has 4.9m followers and often posts about some of the most disturbing things in the world.
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In one viral video, he heads to the dark web in search of chatrooms that pair you with random other people, something that has been available on the normal web, too, on sites like Omegle (which has now closed down).
As he demonstrates, though, when you head to the dark web for this sort of chat, the opening messages people send are way more likely to be pretty gross or downright horrific.
@austinvro matches with a few chatters during his video, one of whom said they were "looking for fun rp chat with my daughters". 'RP' in this situation stands for role-playing, which makes this a pretty horrendous offer.
Another chatter said they were "f25 into roleplaying as younger", which similarly has implications that are grim to consider, and unsurprisingly led the TikToker to call them and the other users "disgusting people".
Even before joining the chat service he found, austinvro had to scroll past links to so-called 'red rooms', which he explained are livestreams where people watch torture and degradation for payment - another disgusting concept.
Needless to say, it's a pretty disturbing situation and one that might rightly warn you off ever wanting to see what the dark web offers for yourself - but @austinvro has a bunch more videos on the topic on his TikTok account if you ever wanted to learn more.
Crucially, you can't navigate around the dark web using a search engine like Google or Bing - it's not like the normal parts of the web we use and isn't indexed in the same way.
This means that to access sites and services you need to know their address and type it in directly, which presumably means there's a word-of-mouth element to how sites become more famous.
