Critics also argue the ban would isolate children, deprive them of positive aspects of social media, drive children to the dark web

Others contend the ban will isolate children, depriving them of the positive aspects of social media, driving them to the dark web,

Some critics argued the ban would not effectively assist children and teenagers’ mental health, instead isolating them from the platforms and possibly encouraging them to seek alternative routes to access platforms, such as the dark web.

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Time, Indian Express, MSN, and more report that some unnamed critics claim, that if Australia bans social media for under-16’s, children will start using the dark web. I’m not sure who first said this, because unfortunately mainstream media outlets are often too lazy to share their sources (or too embarrassed to say they have just copied other articles; note the similarity of the first two quotes), but this is a plain lie.

The dark web is shrouded in mystery and fascination. We know that because of the urban legends of the ‘Red Room’, ‘hitman for hire’, that YouTube trend of people buying ‘mystery boxes’ from the ‘dark web’. The truth about the dark web is actually quite boring in comparison, but I’m not here to discuss that in particular. Rather, I want to point out some simple technical reasons why kids will not use the dark web to use social media.

Connecting to the dark web requires using a program called Tor to connect to the Tor network; your activity is encrypted and bounced through multiple computers in the Tor network. Encryption is a computationally slow process, and bouncing traffic through multiple computers is prone to slowness; all this compounds and means that the Tor network is extremely slow. Downloading a single TikTok video through Tor could take a few minutes, more realistically a half hour. That is how slow it is.

Furthermore, you can tell when someone is connecting to you through Tor. You can’t get the person’s IP address, but you can get the IP address of the last ‘node’ in their chain of computers and identify that it is part of the Tor network. Most major websites do this and will reject any Tor activity, otherwise spammers would use Tor to skirt restrictions.

There is also the fact that the Tor network is completely run by volunteers. If there were a sudden influx of kids trying to watch TikTok over the Tor network, because of the way the network works, it would basically disrupt and render useless the whole system. It isn’t supposed to handle large amounts of data, which is why the organization behind Tor discourages people from using it for torrenting (downloading large files).

I don’t hold it against people for not understanding technology, but I certainly will if you will speak to other people as if you are an authority. I imagine one person said this somewhere for all these articles to pick up on it, and I want it known that person is an idiot. They are using people’s fear and misunderstanding of the dark web for their own agenda, or else showing their own fear and misunderstanding of the dark web. In any case, it is wrong; the only children who will start using the dark web will be potheads who can’t reach their dealer on Instagram anymore.