Twitter launches Dark Web Tor service amid Russian censorship

Blocked by the Russian government, Twitter has entered the Dark Web and people can now access the platform via a Tor Onion service to bypass the censorship. Russian users can use the Tor anonymity network to reach Twitter, announced cyber-security researchers.

But first, let us understand what is Tor?

The Tor project is a non-profit organisation that conducts research and development into online privacy and anonymity. It is designed to stop people – including government agencies and corporations – from learning your location or tracking your browsing habits. Based on that research, it offers a technology that bounces internet users' and websites' traffic through "relays" run by thousands of volunteers around the world, making it extremely hard for anyone to identify the source of the information or the location of the user.

Its software package – the Tor browser bundle – can be downloaded and used to take advantage of that technology, with a separate version available for Android smartphones.

Alec Muffett, the cybersecurity expert and designer of the Enterprise Onion Toolkit which makes deploying Tor Onion services easier took to his Twitter handle and said that it is the most important and long-awaited tweet he has ever composed.

He further said that he is delighted to announce Twitter’s Tor Project Onion service.

Tor’s anonymity network routes a user's Internet connection through a selection of different servers, run mostly by volunteers, around the world.

According to the Tor Project data, In March, 12.77 per cent of Tor relay users were originally connecting from Russia.

Facebook launched its own Tor version in 2014.

Twitter has launched the Tor onion service, optimising it for the privacy-protecting and censorship-evading network.