Let’s say I live under an oppressive regime (don’t we all?) How can I use social media anonymously, so I don’t face reprisals from the government?
Mastodon, Lemmy, Reddit and other social media platforms restrict users who connect through TOR or a VPN.
Is there any way I can create an account on these services and use them anonymously?
Thanks in advance for any information and advice you can provide.
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Only mildly sarcastic, but even if you’re trying to be careful, you reveal a lot about yourself by making comments at all or interacting with a community at all. Your interests, your writing style, your browser footprint, etc. etc. It’s very difficult to not be truly unique if someone out there is purposefully tracking you as an individual. Depending on where the instance is hosted, they may be required to keep server logs and may further be required to divulge those to police for lawful investigations. “Lawful” obviously can vary widely in interpretation, depending on local corruption levels. I know that if I was of interest in an investigation it would not be hard at all to link me to my real identity, and I just sort of live with that.
It’s very difficult to not be truly unique if someone out there is purposefully tracking you as an individual.
And the neat part about that is… it used to be very expensive to do it. Now it blew right on through free, and into highly profitable. So it can be done to everyone everywhere at every moment.
No one knows how many people the Nazis employed to spy on the rest. Some estimates are like 1/4 of the population spied on the others! Today? We can put that to shame using only 0.01% or w/e of our population to spies on the rest. B/c that 0.01% has surveilance tools unimaginably powerful compared to anything the Nazis dreamed about.
There is a place in the world for targeted surveilance of bad people, mass murders, drug kingpins, w/e. You get a judge to sign off, and go to town. But dragnet surveilance of everyone at all times erodes the foundation of free societies.
It’s not completely impossible. We still don’t know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, for example.
I know instances will have to divulge logs if ordered, hence my bid to use TOR/VPN. If there is no way to do that, then I will think of some other way to communicate with people.
We are not state actors.
Whatever man.
I change up my writing style pretty much constantly.
And I switch between muliple accounts on several services, each representing a different fictional character.
And I use a VPN.
Mastodon, Lemmy, Reddit and other social media platforms restrict users who connect through TOR or a VPN
That’s not network-wide, each Lemmy/Mastadon instance can do their own thing in regards to Tor or VPN. Find an instance that allows that or run your own.
Not sure if Reddit changed recently but I just tested logging in/out of an old Reddit account via Tor and it worked fine. But I mostly avoid Reddit nowadays so can’t be sure my posts/comments would work there. Also note their Tor site still works most of the time, you can actually view Reddit that way if you wanted https://old.reddittorjg6rue252oqsxryoxengawnmo46qy4kyii5wtqnwfj4ooad.onion/
(posting this comment via Tor)
Fair enough, I only tried the big instances. I will try lemmy.org as another user suggested.
I had tried making a Reddit account through Mullvad recently, but it shadowbanned me. Same through TOR. Unfortunately some communities I want to participate in are concentrated over there.
If you live in an oppresive regime, there isn’t any posibility to use anonymously an social media, there the only possibility is using a P2P communication system, eg. https://securebit.chat/ or similar. All other, like Lemmy or other from the fediverse are traceable, even with VPN or even not accessible in such regimes with heavy controled servers.
yeah, tbh if you want anonymity, stay off the internet. even P2P has its risks.
Correct, but P2P and Steganography are the only valid resources for eg.Periodists in oppressive countries. In western world all this isn’t really needed, there are enough some basics and common sense to protect sensitive data. I don’t think that any of the Lemmies here are from North Corea, because people there can’t even access other than the own state social network or even use other than the goverment server and ISP.
100% privacy don’t exist in the moment you go online, you can only patch the biggest holes, protecting somewhat against the surveillance of companies, but not against goverments when you are in a criminal investigation, irrelevant what you do, you cant avoid to be targeted if you act against the law, the more than 3000 criminal websites seized by the authorities in the Onion show what are the possibility they have in the web when needed.
You can’t.
Social media is public, period.
If you want private social interactions then use end-to-end encrypted communication services.
Any oppressive regime will have multiple tools that can identify your access to social media services and determine who the human is behind the keyboard. Assume that everything you post on public social media has your real life name and address attached to it.
Unless you’re an expert and taking extreme measures (and you wouldn’t be asking this question if you were such an expert) then anonymous access to online services with respect to a sovereign power with an intelligence service is impossible.
Checkout https://splintercon.net/ and follow the advice given to political dissidents and journalists.
If you don’t post suspicious or radical content, even in oppressive regimes there are no problems. This also means that in these regimes using encrypted messages can be suspicious and a very close look from the authorities. In these regimes, then, it is often used to exchange problematic messages through steganography, that is, to hide these messages in innocent images, texts or music that do not arouse suspicion. Some OpenSource apps and services:
- https://stegoshare.sourceforge.net/
- https://www.openstego.com/
- https://steghide.sourceforge.net/
- https://stegcloak.surge.sh/
etc…
There are always manners to show the middle finger to these regimes
Lemmy doesn’t restrict VPN use. Some instances may
Fair enough. I only tried lemmy.world. I will try .org and .zip to see if they work through TOR. That still leaves Reddit (unfortunately some communities I like are concentrated over there).
This guide is pretty good -> https://ssd.eff.org/playlist/journalist-move
Avoid the internet altogether with Meshtastic or Recticulum if your goal is coordination amongst a closed group.
Good luck stay safe.
Be a Sense8.
Use a VPN and also only share the most common, unoriginal thoughts, parrot the opinions of influencers, and never ever reveal anything that might hint at what makes you a unique soul flickering through the universe.
(basically act like a redditor)
Sure waste money on a VPN and just know itnis doing almost nothing for your privacy.
Since you know tracking people by IP is almost pointless these days wirhbyou know NAT and epically CGNAT.LOL I knew if I put “VPN” as the first thing someone would reply before reading the whole comment
No, you can’t participate in the yelling out your thoughts at max volume system privately.
Social media is public. What you post or reply to is public. Even unexpected metadata about your interactions is public.
You can’t use social media without being social and sociality is by definition not anonymous. Anonymity is antisocial.
You can’t stick your hand in the hand grinding machine safely. It’s meant to grind hands that are stuck in it.
If you’re scared, go to church.
