It ordered the blockage of Twitter on the day Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the Russian information regulator Roskomnadzor last week confirmed the service was blocked, along with Facebook.

Vladimir Putin’s regime was already stepping up Web censorship and surveillance in the years leading up to his invasion of Ukraine, but the Kremlin has really cracked down since it went to war.

(“Tor” stands for The Onion Router, in a nod to how the network’s architecture resembles the layers of an onion.)īut using the dark web through Tor-that is, visiting websites that have the “.onion” suffix-adds even more security, because it avoids having to send traffic through “ exit relay” nodes that can, in some cases, be compromised by censors or spies. The Tor Browser can be used to surf the regular web with extra privacy because it bounces the user’s traffic through a bunch of “relay” connections, it makes it practically impossible for authorities to monitor what the user is doing. The term “ dark web” refers to encrypted networks whose content is unlisted by search engines such as Google, and that can only be accessed through special software, most commonly the Tor Browser, which is backed by U.S. In doing so, Twitter has joined other companies and organizations such as Facebook and the BBC, which have for some years offered such versions of their sites for people in heavily surveilled, censorship-happy societies such as China and Iran.

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