ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. – Internet users who type “paranoia.com” into their search bar will be met with a strange surprise.
The link redirects straight to Disney’s website.
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The domain name is pretty strange, though a search for the owner on WHOIS reveals that it’s owned by ABC — a subsidiary of Disney.
A TikTok video posted in January discusses the creepy phenomenon, asking what the connection between Disney and this strange link is.
So what’s the story here?
To start, Internet Archive shows that the domain dates back to 1994, shortly after the World Wide Web first became available to the public.
The website reportedly started off as an anti-censorship platform and was created by a user who went by the handle “KevinTX.”
Part of a 1995 blog post by KevinTX describing Paranoia reads as follows:
Just to set things straight, Paranoia is run “not-for-profit”. I personally provided all the initial equipment and have supported the system’s costs (in finances and time) at a personal loss because I feel so strongly about the presence of a system like this on the net. It’s been very rewarding to watch an idealistic dream turn into reality! I’ve met a lot of really great net-denizens and seen firsthand how this project has been able to empower people who wouldn’t otherwise have nice net access at a low cost. As the user base has grown in the 7 months since I first offerred low-cost secondary accounts, Paranoia’s resources have also been able to grow.. the community’s ability to allow its users to communicate is much better than each user could provide on their own.
"Thoughs on Paranoia and the Internet" by KevinTX (April 6, 1995)
As a result, KevinTX said that he wanted to create a platform allowing users to speak freely without fear of government, universities or major companies tamping down on speech.
According to KevinTX, the website became popular with many new Internet users at the time, getting attention from other local outlets like the Austin Chronicle and Texas Monthly.
The site also featured hundreds of web pages created by users. These pages featured topics such as “Weird Al” Yankovic, The Simpsons cartoon, and a Star Trek-themed drinking game.
However, several pages on the site were dedicated to more illicit topics, including cannibalism, suicide assistance, prostitution, pedophilia, drug use, and plenty of sexual content.
The website and its disturbing content were eventually taken down in 1999 — reportedly due to server issues — but by 2000, the site began directing users to a French webpage, Internet Archive shows.
The webpage appeared to feature a search engine, email options, news stories, calendar and weather reports, and a copyright at the bottom of the page says it was registered under Excite Europe, a marketing company headquartered in Germany.
After a couple more years, the link directed users to Go.com — a website that fed users to various web pages operated by Disney and its subsidiaries.
As of 2024, the link sends users straight to Disney’s main homepage. This means that Disney — through ABC — owns the domain name, but for what reason?
Some domain names that use titles from Disney films — “mulan.com,” “lionking.com,” and “treasureplanet.com,” to name a few — lead to their corresponding film pages on Disney’s website.
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As such, the purchase of “paranoia.com” could potentially have been a result of one of Disney’s or its subsidiaries’ projects that was later scrapped. News 6 has reached out to Disney for more information but has not yet received a response.
Without an official statement from the company, it appeared as though the mystery would go unsolved.
That was until last month when a YouTube channel called Nexpo released a video about the domain name, titled “Paranoia.com: An Internet Mystery.”
The video shows that a TV game show dubbed “Paranoia” was produced in 2000 by the Fox Family Channel.
According to an archived episode of the program, the game show involved a guest competing against three other players over the air by answering multiple-choice questions.
“We’ve got people live who are going to play over the phone, live on the internet, and live via satellite, and they all have one thing in common,” the show’s host, Peter Tomarken, says. “They’re trying to make our in-studio contestant paranoid.”
The Internet Archive shows that the program had its very own dedicated website, “paranoia.excite.com.”
According to CNN, Excite was one of the earliest search engines, being relatively prominent in the late 1990s, hence why it might have been found in the game show’s domain name.
In 2001, Disney acquired the Family Fox Channel, rebranding the network as ABC Family. As a result, if the Fox Family Channel owned the domain name, it could have transferred along with the network.
However, there is no wholly conclusive evidence to prove whether that is the case.
In the meantime, News 6 has reached out to Disney to ask about why the domain name currently redirects users to the company’s website, though the company has yet to respond.
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