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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Mastodon nor Lemmy restrict your use of Tor or VPN. Maybe an instance does, but hardly every instance. Just find an instance that doesn’t restrict your use.
Nostr? Or get off your ass and make a website.
Fellow under an oppressive regime! I signed onto Fediverse entirely through VPN with no issues! Be very careful to not say too much about yourself so they can track you; lie. Lie a lot. When not lying, do not give away any information about yourself.
Mastodon and Lemmy do not restrict users who connect from Tor or a VPN.
Never had a problem on Lemmy or Mastodon with a VPN. If you create a Reddit account through a VPN, though, you will get shadowbanned. I made my Lemmy and Mastodon accounts with a VPN and had zero issues.
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.
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 used to be very expensive to do it. Now it blew right on through free, and into highly profitable
Fuck! Never even thought about like that.
Everything in your post is too well put together. I think we just found Edward Snowden’s Lemmy account.
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.
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.
I’ve been using Lemmy and previously Reddit for years with a VPN without issue.
I made a new Reddit account through Mullvad a while ago and immediately got shadow banned. Reddit has been aggressive against new users who use TOR/VPN and browsers that resist fingerprinting.
Maybe you could use a Chromebook and log in from a busy location with many other users?
Only VPN I’ve ever used is Mullvad. Granted I didn’t use it to create my account but I’ve been accessing it for 4 years with it.
Granted I didn’t use it to create my account
I bet that’s like 90% of what they care about tho. They really want to ID you when you first sign up, but they might care not as much about day to day use.
It’s fuzzier with reddit tho. Used to be you could sign up with a VPN with success. Some still have accts made like that. They are much sticklier now. It maybe possible but just rarely, and nobody seems to know what makes the diff. It also used to be posible to sign up with Tor, but today that’s instant shadowban.
My side rant is that shadowbans are MF-ing evil. I got caught in one because I used a VPN to sign up. I only ever tried to answer people on a tech help sub. I was posting in good faith. Tried to be helpful and contribute to the community. But none of my posts were ever being engaged with. No upvotes, no downvotes, no replies. Finally I looked without being signed in (“open in private window”) and sure enough… nobody but me could see my posts.
It felt bad, man. I put my time and effort into trying to help other people, for nothing.
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.
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
It’s a bit like walking through the park every day shouting at people, and not wanting anyone to know who you are. Eventually they’d figure it out.
You can’t use social media anonymously, it will all be pseudonymous aslong as you engage, if you consume social media passively, you can. But their have been reports that passive social media consumption is tied to negative mental health.
I should have communicated more clearly. Pseudonymous is fine, as long as it cannot be tied back to my real identity via tracing my IP address or whatever.
I think Tor with Tor Bridges (to obscure that you use Tor) is your best bet. Or using Tor over a VPN (using a VPN systemwide and then connect to Tor)
Everything else is just standard opsec, not leaking personal information and so on
Also, don’t use a E-Mail address or phone number tied to your real information, like your name or IP address. Because that is how many people got caught in the past.
The problem is that Reddit shadow bans new accounts that use TOR or any browsers that resist fingerprinting. I know because I tried recently.
Oh I’m aware of this, their is no way around this without revealing personal data :(
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.
Not a fan of the marketing speak on that page, as a cryptography nerd there’s a lot of questionable stuff.
SAS authentication is stone cold dead in the LLM age. P2P with friends is trivially trackable by the ISP and can easily map who knows who. ECDSA isn’t “industry leading”, that would be EdDSA or something based on Risetto, or a pq algorithm like ML-DSA
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.
Depends on how repressive.
Often your main method of staying safe is appearing harmless.
You can find dedicated Mastodon and lemmy hosts more receptive to VPN users.
Anonymous use is hard due to stuff like timing attacks and writing style recognition, etc, especially if you post publicly. You want to mimic another style, for example. And create plausible deniability around timings (like say scheduled posts)
Thank you, I will keep timing attacks in mind when making my posts. Writing style recognition is not a big problem since they won’t have any samples to compare my posts against.
Checkout https://splintercon.net/ and follow the advice given to political dissidents and journalists.
