To avoid censorship, Twitter has decided to offer its service over the Tor network.
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After Russian ban: Twitter now accessible via Tor network
© Twitter / Gate
To prevent the free flow of information about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia last week began blocking access to Twitter, Facebook and foreign news channels.
Twitter has now decided to offer its service via the Tor network. The service wants to avoid censorship as much as possible and continue to make Twitter accessible to users in countries where it has been banned by governments – as is currently the case in Russia.
The network encrypts its own traces and routes them through a number of different servers, so information for identifying users can remain largely hidden. The user only needs to have a supported Tor browser or version of Tor installed to access the special pages ending in “.onion”.
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Tor Browser
With Twitter now accessible through Tor, people in Russia can still access the service and learn about the conflict and other global events.
On the
official twitter page
the Tor network is already listed as supported. According to Alec Muffett, who helped develop it, the gateway is based on a variant of the Enterprise Onion Toolkit that has been modified to meet Twitter’s needs.
In addition to Twitter, a number of other social networks and news portals also offer their services via the Tor network:
