March 10, 2023
Twitter’s decision to let its Tor onion service certificate expire has resulted in the platform’s disappearance from the dark web as more users seek privacy and anonymity online. This comes after The Tor Project, the non-profit org responsible for maintaining software for the Tor network, confirmed that Twitter’s onion site “is no longer available seemingly with no plans to renew.”
Users who visit Twitter’s Tor onion website will receive a warning that its certificate has expired, and they will be redirected to an error page if they continue. Although, users can still visit Twitter.com via a browser running Tor but won’t get the added benefits a Tor-specific onion site confers.
Twitter launched its now-defunct Tor service just days after it was blocked in Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. Tor is also known as “The Onion Router” because it encrypts internet traffic and routes it through thousands of servers around the world, giving its users anonymity and the ability to circumvent censorship systems.
People could use the dark web service to access Twitter from anywhere in the world, including Russia and other countries where it was prohibited. It also provided additional privacy for Twitter users who did not want their online activity to be tracked by governments, corporations, or hackers.
Tor Project communications director Pavel Zoneff confirmed the service’s outage in a statement saying: “The onion site is no longer available seemingly with no plans to renew. The Tor Project has reached out to Twitter to look into bringing the onion version of the social media platform back online.” “People who rely on onion services for an extra layer of protection and guarantee that they are accessing the content they are looking for now have one fewer way of doing so safely.”
The sources for this piece include an article in TechCrunch.
