Following pressure from certain users and consumer safety organizations over its removal, Twitter Inc. has reinstated a feature that advertises suicide prevention hotlines and other safety options to users seeking for specific material.
According to two people with knowledge of the situation, the function’s removal was mandated by the social media platform’s new owner Elon Musk. Reuters reported on Friday that the feature had been removed a few days prior.
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Twitter’s head of trust and safety Ella Irwin verified the removal after the article was published and described it as temporary.
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According to Irwin in an email to Reuters, Twitter was “improving relevancy, optimizing the size of the message prompts, and removing obsolete prompts.” “We are aware of their value, and we never intended to take them down forever.”
Musk, who first ignored calls for comment, tweeted “False, it is still there” around 15 hours after the initial allegation. He also posted, “Twitter doesn’t prevent suicide,” in response to Twitter users’ criticism.
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The #ThereIsHelp feature displays a banner at the top of search results for particular topics. There are phone numbers given for support groups for mental health, HIV, vaccinations, child sexual exploitation, COVID-19, gender-based violence, natural catastrophes, and freedom of speech in many different nations.
On Saturday, the banner reappeared in international searches for domestic violence and suicide using abbreviations like “shtwt,” which stands for “self-harm Twitter.”
It was unclear if the feature had been reinstated for additional categories. Some search terms that Twitter had previously claimed to have activated the functionality—such as “#HIV”—were not returning the feature.
An inquiry for comment on Saturday went unanswered by Irwin.
Although consumer safety organizations have criticized the firm for permitting tweets that they claim violate the guidelines, Twitter prohibits users from promoting self-harm.
On searches for self-harm on Saturday, tweets with graphic images of individuals slashing their arms were displayed beneath banners.
Some consumer safety organizations and Twitter users expressed worry for the safety of the network’s most vulnerable users when #ThereIsHelp vanished from the platform.
Internet platforms like Twitter, Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O), and Meta’s Facebook (META.O) have sought for years to point users to reputable resource providers for safety problems, in part as a result of pressure from these groups.
“Google does incredibly well with these in their search results,” Twitter’s Irwin said in a Friday email, “and (we) are actually mimicking some of their approach with the adjustments we are making.”
Google offers extremely relevant message prompts based on search phrases, she continued, and they are always up to date and well tailored for both mobile and the web.
The absence of #ThereIsHelp was “very disturbing,” according to Eirliani Abdul Rahman, a member of a recently disbanded Twitter content advisory board, and fully eliminating a feature to redesign it was rare.
