Twitter has launched a new Tor onion service, a move that has been in the works for years but debuts as Russian President Vladimir Putin has clamped down on protests and independent media following his stalled invasion of Ukraine.
“On behalf of @Twitter, I am delighted to announce their new @TorProject onion service,” tweeted Alec Muffett, a security researcher who developed the Enterprise Onion Toolkit. EOTK, as it’s also known, allows websites to quickly add onion services.
“This is possibly the most important and long-awaited tweet that I’ve ever composed,” he added.
The new Twitter onion service is accessible at the following address:
twitter3e4tixl4xyajtrzo62zg5vztmjuricljdp2c5kshju4avyoid.onionUsers can access it through a Tor-compatible browser like the Tor Browser or Brave, which supports Tor in its private-browsing mode.
Neither Twitter nor Muffett tied the announcement to either the Ukraine invasion or Putin’s clampdown on civil rights. But the timing is right, and the move could allow some Russians to access the social media network. Last week, people reported that the site was being blocked inside the country.
Twitter hasn’t confirmed whether Roskomnadzor, the Russian Internet censorship agency, has been able to fully block the service, but the company has reported that people inside the country have been encountering difficulties reaching its site.
Muffett’s EOTK is intended for use with websites that already have a public-facing, non-Tor presence. Adding EOTK allows administrators to add a .onion address with minimal pain. In Twitter’s case, though, Muffett said that he and the company’s engineers had to implement “considerable though reasonable modification to meet their extraordinary production requirements.”
Tor works by routing Internet traffic through at least three relays, with data encrypted at each step, creating layers of encryption like an onion—hence the name, The Onion Router. Currently, there are more than 7,000 relays on the network and nearly 3,000 bridges, which are hidden relays intended to help circumvent censorship.
Facebook has had an onion service since 2014, when the company said it launched the address as an experiment. Now, nearly eight years later, it’s still accessible and has been upgraded to meet the new standards for v3 onion services.
Several other popular websites—including the BBC, Deutsche Welle, Radio Free Europe, The New York Times, and The Intercept—are also available with Tor services. Muffett has an extensive list available on his Github repository.
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