Unblock Twitter with a VPN

Today, there are three countries that block Twitter completely: China, North Korea and Iran. Others place restrictions or have censored it in some way or another. These are France, Egypt, South Korea, Russia, Turkey and Venezuela. China does its blocking on a cultural and political basis, along with North Korea. These two countries’ leaders prefer their territories to remain more isolated than elsewhere. Iran has blocked Twitter since 2009, mainly to suppress information and prevent people from organizing against those on power.

In the case of the rest of the countries, Twitter basically complied in every single case regarding censorship, regardless of the nature of it. We speculate that the case is such because Twitter has an interest in operating in the above countries as well. In the case of Russia, France or Turkey, we can say that events at the time and the laws governing internet activity also had an effect on the acts of censorship. but then, again, you could argue that the laws are the result of political, cultural and financial interest in the first place.

Next to proxies and VPN there is another type of service that can unblock restrictions, though partially only: smart DNS proxy servers. It focuses on streaming websites, mostly. It has some additional disadvantages, for example it has no inherent form of protection (opposed to VPN). The only positive aspect of it is that you retain the speed of your original internet connection. From the viewpoint of using Twitter, this is not that relevant. VPN on the other hand is a very safe service. Your data traffic is going to be encrypted, meaning that it will be surrounded by a protective layer of data, making it very hard for anyone monitoring you to find out what is it that you are doing online. Additionally, a VPN usually works on a country to country basis. This means that you connect to other countries’ online domains; this makes all and any websites accessible that a given country has for you. Therefore for Twitter usage, VPN is clearly a better choice in our opinion.

We would like to call attention to the fact that despite Twitter has decent device support, the VPN company you are subscribed to might not have the same extensive device list. Always make sure to compare these availabilities and plan your Twitter usage based on that. In general, PC, Mac, Android and iOS are always safe bets; these are typically all supported by a quality VPN provider.

Setting a VPN up is generally an easy process, regardless of the device you intend to get to work. Your only task is to change the VPN network settings of your machine to those supplied by the VPN company of your choice. This process slightly differs from device to device, but it follows the same major steps. And lastly, to bring up some notable examples, we would like to namedrop a few companies that are excellent at unblocking Twitter: PureVPN, IPVanish and Private Internet Access are all well-established and reliable organizations to consider.