Twitter quietly launches Tor service in the face of Russian censorship

Twitter just struck a blow against government censorship, even if the tech giant won't come out and say so directly.

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

Tor works by sending users' internet traffic through random servers, and encrypting that traffic at every step. This means a website can't see who specifically is browsing it, and an ISP can't see what sites its customers are viewing. Tor is great, to put it bluntly, for doing things you wish to keep to yourself.

"This is possibly the most important and long-awaited tweet that I've ever composed," wrote Muffett. "On behalf of @Twitter, I am delighted to announce their new @TorProject onion service, at: https://twitter3e4tixl4xyajtrzo62zg5vztmjuricljdp2c5kshju4avyoid.onion/"

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Users equipped with the free Tor browser will now be able to access Twitter's onion site directly from anywhere in the world where Tor works. That Twitter now has its own Tor site adds a layer of protection beyond what a user would get simply by going to Twitter.com with a Tor browser.

"Onion services' location and IP address are hidden, making it difficult for adversaries to censor them or identify their operators," Tor explains. "All traffic between Tor users and onion services is end-to-end encrypted, so you do not need to worry about connecting over HTTPS."

This is not Muffett's first effort at mixing privacy and social media. He built Facebook's Tor site, and in 2021 helped the New York Times rebuild its own onion site.

We reached out to Twitter with a host of questions about its new Tor service, but the company declined to address our specific questions.

"Making our service more accessible is an ongoing priority for us," replied a company spokesperson, who also pointed us toward Twitter's list of supported browsers — which now includes the Tor browser.

"I'm delighted to have assisted @Twitter engineers in their adoption of #OnionServices & #OnionNetworking from @TorProject," added Muffett, "providing greater privacy, integrity, trust, & 'unblockability' for people all around the world who use @Twitter to communicate."

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Indeed, the addition of a Twitter onion site comes at a particularly noteworthy time. On Feb. 26, Twitter said its service was being "restricted for some people in Russia," and that it was "working to keep our service safe and accessible."

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Tuesday's announcement, which would allow Russians to access Twitter's website in the face of government restrictions, appears to be part of that work — even if Twitter won't make that connection explicit.