Twitter quietly launches Tor service in the face of Russian censorship

Even though the tech giant won't say so directly, it struck a blow against government censorship.

On Tuesday morning, Alec Muffett, a cybersecurity professional with a long history of working with the Tor network, announced he had brought skills to bear at the social media site. Muffett wrote that he helped the company launch a censorship-resistant way for users to access the social media platform even if government officials in a country like Russia wanted to prevent that.

It is possible to send internet traffic through random server and then have it be locked up at every step. This means that an internet service provider cannot see what sites its customers are viewing. For doing things you want to keep to yourself, it's great.

Muffett wrote that this is possibly the most important and long-awaited tweet he has ever composed.

Tweet may have been deleted

Users with the free browser will be able to access the onion site from anywhere in the world. A user would get protection from what they would get if they went to Twitter.com with a Tor browser, but that is not the case now.

The location and address of onion services are hidden, making it difficult for adversaries to censor them or identify their operators.

Muffett has mixed privacy and social media before. He helped rebuild the New York Times onion site in 2021.

We asked a lot of questions about the new service, but the company wouldn't answer them.

Making our service more accessible is an ongoing priority for us, and we were pointed to the list of supported browsers by a company spokesman.

Muffett said that he was delighted to have assisted the engineers in their adoption of Onion Services.

Tweet may have been deleted

The addition of a onion site comes at a particularly noteworthy time. On February 26th, the company said that it was working to keep its service safe and accessible, and that it was restricted for some people in Russia.

Tweet may have been deleted

Even though it won't make that connection explicit, Tuesday's announcement that would allow Russians to access the website in the face of government restrictions appears to be part of that work.