[giantg2]

"As C3P will tell you: CSAM distribution on Tor onion services is not inevitable."

Lol, are we using the regular internet as an example of preventing all CSAM?

We've known for years that owning enough nodes results in the compromise of privacy and that it's likely the NSA has achieved this. Although there is some question around how that plays out if adversaries like China are also competing for similar node share percentage.

[bnl_umass]

There is no question about that. The site makes use of current statistics from the Tor Project.

[datadrivenangel]

As a percent of onion services, what does it work out to, a few percent? And how much of that is dedicated abuse sites versus general adult sites?

[neutered_knot]

Your question made me curious so I tried to see what information about onion sites is available. It’s hard to measure onions sites by design, but

https://99firms.com/research/tor-stats

Says there seem to be about 65k onion sites.

This site:

https://protectchildren.ca/en/press-and-media/blog/2025/tor-...

Has some varying numbers depending on the observation time, but in final month listed saw 30k sites that had they identified as having CSAM.

I’m not sure how accurate either number is or if they are directly comparable but that would be a 50% of all onion sites ballpark.

Not sure how to measure general sites vs dedicated abuse sites.

[datadrivenangel]

Looks like the tor metrics site says ~900k onion sites?

https://metrics.torproject.org/hidserv-dir-v3-onions-seen.ht...

[atomic128]

In reality there are fewer than 1000 "real" hidden services (see https://rnsaffn.com/zg4/ for HTTP response dumps) and an ocean of short-lived temporary spam onions, most of them pornography.