Twitter Launches Tor Service, Helps Russian Users Avoid Putin's Government Censorship

Twitter launches Tor to help Russians circumvent censorship (Photo: Pixabay doc)

JAKARTA - Russia's invasion of Ukraine recently prompted Twitter to launch the Tor service to help Russians avoid censorship when using this social media.

The social media giant introduced Tor which allows users to access twitter when it is blocked in certain countries. Tor's anonymity will also help protect it from prying eyes. Tor is Twitter's simple solution to Russia's ban on the social network.

According to the software engineer, Alec Muffett, the platform is based on a version of the Enterprise Onion Toolkit (EOTK) customized to meet Twitter's production requirements.

He broke the news via his Twitter account due to concerns that news on the official Twitter Safety account would result in a load spike flooding the Tor service just when it was needed.

"The most important and most awaited tweet I have ever made. The Tor network has also been added to Twitter supported browser pages," he wrote.

This is possibly the most important and long-awaited tweet that I've ever composed.On behalf of @Twitter, I am delighted to announce their new @TorProject onion service, at:https://t.co/Un8u0AEXeE pic.twitter .com/AgEV4ZZt3k

— Alec Muffett (@AlecMuffett) March 8, 2022

Twitter's onion service is available on onions when using the Tor Browser or similar tools. While you can already access the regular Twitter website via Tor, the newly released version will add even more layers of protection to the already anonymized browsing experience designed specifically for the network.

"It's a commitment from the platform to deal with people who use Tor in a fair way," Muffett said.

“Setting up onion addresses is a practical step in demonstrating that the platform explicitly caters to the needs of the people who use Tor,” Muffett told The Verge.

While President Vladimir Putin's administration has banned the media from challenging official narratives about the war, Twitter may offer one of the few ways to access objective reporting in Russia. Users can use Tor onion to post without worrying too much that others might be tracking their online activity.

Onion's services are sometimes dubbed hidden services or "dark web" services, although the latter often refers to explicit criminal sites such as the Silk Road drug market.

A number of websites offering specialized versions of Tor, including the DuckDuckGo search engine and news outlets such as The New York Times, BBC, and ProPublica, and others for receiving documents securely, also run through Tor.