Twitter is launching a Tor service for safer and personal tweeting

Twitter is launching a model of its web site as a Tor onion service, optimizing it for the privacy-protecting and censorship-evading community. Software engineer Alec Muffett announced the news immediately on Twitter, describing it as “possibly the most important and long-awaited tweet that I’ve ever composed.” The Tor community has additionally been added to Twitter’s supported browsers page.

Twitter’s onion service is offered at https://twitter3e4tixl4xyajtrzo62zg5vztmjuricljdp2c5kshju4avyoid.onion whereas utilizing Tor Browser or an identical instrument. While you may already entry Twitter’s odd web site through Tor, the newly launched model provides extra layers of safety to the already anonymized searching expertise and is designed particularly for the community.

“It’s a commitment from the platform to dealing with people who use Tor in an equitable fashion,” Muffett advised The Verge over Twitter direct message. “Setting up an onion address is a practical step which demonstrates that the platform is providing explicitly for the needs of people who use Tor.”

Onion providers are typically dubbed hidden providers or “dark web” providers, though the latter typically refers to explicitly felony websites just like the Silk Road drug market. A number of websites supply Tor-specific variations, together with the DuckDuckGo search engine and information shops like The New York Times, the BBC, and ProPublica. Tools like SecureDrop, which The Verge and different websites use to obtain safe paperwork, additionally run by Tor.

Muffett, who works with firms to implement onion websites, tweeted that he’s been discussing the opportunity of a Tor-friendly Twitter since 2014. That’s when Facebook launched its personal hidden service, a transfer designed to repair severe performance points for Tor customers who have been typically incorrectly flagged as botnets. Facebook mentioned in 2016 that a million users per month have been accessing the usual web site or onion service by Tor.

Tor encrypts internet site visitors and routes it by a collection of servers to cover figuring out details about customers. It’s a well-liked option to entry websites which are topic to web censorship, and that’s made it notably related since Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, which spurred a Russian crackdown on Twitter, Facebook, and unbiased information providers. Some web service suppliers began censoring Tor itself in December of 2021, however the Tor Project told Vice today that the precise stage of blocking has diversified, and Russian customers can nonetheless join via a Tor bridge.

Twitter’s onion service has been within the works far longer and has advantages that transcend merely accessing a blocked platform, nevertheless. It forces folks to make use of Tor’s community, because it doesn’t work with odd browsers, and it protects towards some safety dangers launched by commonplace internet addresses. “If you are running Tor Browser and click [or] type in exactly the proper onion address, you are guaranteed to be connected to what you expect — or not at all,” explains Muffett.

Having a definite entry path additionally helps platforms like Facebook and Twitter extra simply monitor malicious exercise that takes benefit of Tor (like automated scraping or assaults on the location) with out blocking or degrading service for good-faith customers. Even if most individuals don’t use Tor to entry Twitter, it’s an enchancment for those who do — and a transfer towards better mainstream acceptance for the system.