It was a long time since I didn’t use Tor to browse the web. Then I came across in un tweet: Twitter is now also available through Tor. To circumvent censorship, to continue to be used in Russia despite Putin’s ban.
Tor is one of those beautiful, volunteer-run nonprofit projects that make the Net work better. Born twenty years ago, Tor is free software which allows you to surf the Internet anonymously and securely through an onion network (Tor stands for The Onion Router) thanks to computers made available by volunteers. The basic idea is that everyone has the right to access the internet uncensored and anonymously.
Obviously, people who carry out illegal activities also take advantage of this, but Tor is above all a fundamental tool for activists who use the Net under authoritarian regimes. It is no coincidence that Russia was already in December second country in the world for Tor users (about 300 thousand). Just in December, the Russian Ministry of Information ne had enacted the ban, but blocking Tor is more difficult than we think. The Tor managers have in fact created a mirror site (thanks to the Electronic Frontier Foundation) and have multiplied the computers of volunteers who create computer bridges to override the censorship (in three months they passed from 1200 to 2470 in February).
The choice of Twitter to become accessible through Tor for the first time marks an important step, given the fundamental role of this social network in the information battle, and it is not isolated: through Tor you can also access Facebook, another social network blocked in Russia, and the BBC (as well as ProPublica and The Intercept). In short, the information somehow passes. The Net is once again proving to be an instrument of freedom