Mar 21, 2019 3 min read

The World Wide Web celebrated a milestone earlier this month with the 30th anniversary of the internet’s commercial availability to the public.

It was on March 12, 1989, that English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee jotted down a concept in which users could access what was the concept of an interconnected web of computers and create websites for others to view.

While the internet, per se, existed long before that, this was the first time it could allow people to access and build web pages on their own.

Over the next decade, the concept grew into the mainstream and became a daily part of our lives. The internet – as it existed in the late 1990s and early 2000s – was a way to connect with people far away, share ideas, learn something new or just have fun.

But over the last decade, the dark web has darkened our views.

There was no better example of that than when an Australian gunman killed 50 Muslin men, women and children at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

To add to his sinister plan, he live-streamed the massacre using a body camera, showing the carnage for all to see in real time on Facebook. While the social media company later took down the video, it already had been broadcast with saved files being shared by right-wing extremist groups that could use it in their hateful propaganda.

Surely, Berners-Lee didn’t have this vision 30 years ago when he helped to open the web to the public.

While ugly nature of the World Wide Web has worldwide storylines, it also has local ones.

A Bethel Park man was arrested this week and accused of making threats against that town’s high school and its principal. Bethel Park police said 18-year-old Xavier Cisneros trafficked in the dark web of extremist message boards, such as 4chan and 8chan that encourage users to spew hate.

His arrest also came on the heals of a revelation that the state’s new Safe 2 Say program, which is designed to allow people to come forward with information about potential threats against schools, had fielded more than 7,000 tips in the first six weeks it’s been operating. Nearly one-third of those were considered serious enough to report to local police and school officials, meaning Pennsylvania was seeing more than 55 plausible threats every day.

That’s a jarring figure.

While all of those threats weren’t necessarily borne from the internet, it should still be a wakeup call to parents on putting some restriction on how their children surf the web, either from their computers or smartphones.

The availability of all sorts of information was supposed to be an advantage with the internet. Instead, it seems to be an indication about how dark the mood is in our country and world.