I'm glad I am not the only one that thinks that this is odd. So you can browse anonymously to a site that by its very nature is built around a profile of a REAL person. What happened to just offering up the service under full TLS?

This just looks like a dirty anti-gov protest and mass publicity stunt. It offers a false and wrong sense of security to the users. We have reports of rogue TOR exit nodes that try to insert malware, and we assume that we can actually trust the owners of this infrastructure? I'm sorry, I am all for security, improvements to services that ensure people I don't want seeing my communications, can't, but this? Calling bullshit on this.

Your country's government has been toppled by a totalitarian junta. You, as a leader of the opposition, use Facebook to mobilize the persecuted democratic counter-revolution. You don't want your government to know where you are, but you need identified access to Facebook.

There, that's why you need the Facebook .onion. You can have reason to fear the initial hops of your packets but not the destination.

There's a big difference between the security of exit nodes (which see all the traffic passing through them in the form in which it travels over the Internet) and using .onion addresses, where the intermediate hosts don't see any of the data unencrypted.

To my mind, accessing the general Internet is not what you want to do with TOR -- ideally the service you want to access will also be on .onion, allowing you to avoid exit nodes. In practice, that's not going to be possible in all cases so exit nodes are a necessary evil requiring extra care.

You could be a real person and not want to disclose your IP.

They are two separate things.