Twitter is poking a hole in Russia’s attempt to block access to the social media platform by creating a way to access the site on the dark web.
On Tuesday, the company launched a Tor onion service domain for the Twitter site, using the address https://twitter3e4tixl4xyajtrzo62zg5vztmjuricljdp2c5kshju4avyoid.onion.
To visit the page, a user has to first download the Tor browser, which is designed to anonymize your web traffic. It can also help users access government-blocked websites by routing your internet traffic through a network of volunteer servers across the globe.
Twitter's Tor site is also designed to work more efficiently over the Tor network, making it easier to access while also providing better user anonymity. But interestingly, the social media platform is not officially promoting the Tor mirror site. Instead, it quietly announced the project through Alec Muffet, a cybersecurity expert who helped Twitter engineers create the Tor destination.
The low-key approach is meant to prevent an uptick in traffic, which might disrupt Twitter’s newly unveiled Tor site, Muffet wrote in a tweet.
“So why am I first(-ish?) to tweet about it? From past experience with the Facebook and BBC Onion sites, any sufficiently large announcement leads to a load-spike, and given that @TwitterSafety has 3.6 million followers it would not be wise in a time of global crisis,” he said.
Twitter declined to comment on the Tor site. But a company spokesperson pointed to a help page, which shows Twitter now officially supports the Tor browser.
The Tor site arrives as the Kremlin blocks access to Twitter and other US social media platforms, preventing locals from reading about the war in Ukraine from other news sources.
Russia also blocked the Tor browser's main website in December. However, the nonprofit behind the software, the Tor Project, has been setting up mirror links in response. So there's a chance Russian users will have the browser already or be able to find it online.
Others such as Facebook, The New York Times, and even Pornhub have created Tor onion services for their pages so that users can continue to access them even under strict online censorship. To bypass the blocking, local Russians have also been trying VPN services, which have been surging in popularity in recent weeks in the country. However, the Kremlin has been trying to stamp out their use.