Twitter Inc has restored a feature that promotes suicide prevention hotlines and other safety resources to users looking up certain content, after coming under pressure from some users and consumer safety groups over its removal.
Reuters on Friday reported that the feature was taken down a few days ago, citing two people familiar with the matter, who said the removal was ordered by the social media platform’s new owner, Elon Musk.
After publication of the story, Twitter head of trust and safety Ella Irwin confirmed the removal and called it temporary.
Photo: AFP
Twitter was “fixing relevance, optimizing the size of the message prompts and correcting outdated prompts,” Irwin said in an e-mail to Reuters. “We know they are useful and our intent was not to have them down permanently.”
Musk did not initially respond to requests for comment.
However, about 15 hours after the initial report, he tweeted: “False, it is still there.”
In response to criticism by Twitter users, he also wrote: “Twitter doesn’t prevent suicide.”
The feature, known as #ThereIsHelp, places a banner at the top of search results for certain topics. It has listed contacts for support organizations in many countries related to mental health, HIV, vaccines, child sexual exploitation, COVID-19, gender-based violence, natural disasters and freedom of expression.
By Saturday, the banner returned to searches about suicide and domestic violence in multiple countries under terms such as “shtwt,” shorthand for “self-harm Twitter.”
Whether the feature had been restored for other categories was not clear.
The feature was not appearing for some search queries that Twitter has previously said triggered it, such as “#HIV.”
Irwin did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.
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