Tor Audience in Belarus Rise after Blocking

How­ev­er, the block­ing gave a con­trary effect: before the block­ing, there were 5000 users of Tor in Belarus; since Decem­ber, the num­ber of direct users dropped to 3000, but the num­ber of users con­nect­ing to Tor through Bridges changed from sev­er­al hun­dreds to 3000 at peak time. Thus, the audi­ence rose to 6000 users.

The num­ber of Tor users is not sta­ble, for exam­ple, there were 10 thou­sand users in August – Sep­tem­ber 2013 and the same num­ber kept in 2015.

In coun­tries with pop­u­la­tion com­pa­ra­ble to Belarus, there are quite dif­fer­ent num­bers of Tor users: there are 20 thou­sand users in Swe­den, 15 thou­sand in Aus­tria, 10.5 thou­sand in the Czech Repub­lic, 6 – 7 thou­sand in Bul­gar­ia, 15 thou­sand in Switzer­land (with sharp ris­es to 50 thou­sand), 10 thou­sand in Israel (with up to 50 thou­sand from time to time), less than a thou­sand in Hon­duras, Azer­bai­jan and Tajik­istan.

In all, around two mil­lion peo­ple use Tor, with a jump of 6 mil­lion in 2013, and around 50 thou­sand peo­ple use Tor via Bridges.