Throughout the movie Unfriended: Dark Web, computer security, its exploitation, and an exploration of the "darkweb" and cryptocurrency are all explored by screenwriter Stephen Susco. In incorporating these themes into the movie, Susco seeks to display the importance and impact that technology has on humans, especially with regards to the impact it has on social networks.
In the movie, various events such as a laptop being hacked to present someone as a threat during a swatting event, or a malevolent person taking control of a group chat and video call, are all crafted to be events that could conceivably transpire in reality. Susco answers in an interview with Thrillist journalist Dan Jackson that all of the writing for these events was completed in a fashion where all the events could "be something that could happen in the real world." [1] Specifically, events such as the group chat infiltration and breach in data security were written after extensive research on "government surveillance and hacker penetration", with the screenwriter intending to demonstrate to audiences the very real possibility that every conversation that occurs between an individual and their connected peers could very well be read through or tampered with by a skilled individual.
Furthermore, lead cast member Rebecca Rittenhouse comments on the possibility of people's social media postings being used directly against them, citing an incident where a friend's location was tracked down by an individual using only the backgrounds of images that they had posted publicly online. This echoes a theme familiar to the movie, with videos recorded by the protagonists being doctored and used against them by Charon. With an increasing popularity in documenting our lives social media, the amount of publicly available information on each individual person has grown at an alarming rate. With photos shared of our homes, locations of interest around our living spaces, it would take little effort to reconstruct and divine the location of homes for people that regularly post on social media.