Twitter Inc has restored the feature of promoting suicide prevention hotlines and other safety resources for users searching for certain content, after coming under pressure from some users and safety groups. consumers about removing this feature.
Reuters reported on Friday that the feature was taken down a few days ago, citing two people familiar with the matter, who said the new owner of the social media platform ordered the removal. Elon Musk.
After publishing the story, Twitter Head of trust and safety Ella Irwin confirmed the removal and called it temporary.
Twitter has “fixed relevance, optimized the size of message reminders, and fixed outdated reminders,” Irwin said in an email to Reuters. “We know they’re useful, and our intention is not to permanently knock them down.”
About 15 hours after the initial report, Musk, who did not initially respond to requests for comment, tweeted “Wrong, it’s still there.” In response to criticism from Twitter users, he also tweeted “Twitter doesn’t prevent suicide.”
The feature, called #ThereIsHelp, places a banner at the top of search results for certain topics. It listed contacts of support organizations in many countries related to mental health, HIV, vaccines, child sexual exploitation, COVID-19, gender-based violence , natural disasters and free speech.
By Saturday, the banner had returned to searches about suicide and domestic violence in many countries with terms like “shtwt,” which stands for “Twitter self-harm.”
It is unclear if this feature has been restored for other categories. The feature doesn’t appear for some search queries that Twitter previously said enabled it, such as “#HIV”.
Irwin did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.
Twitter bans users from encouraging self-harm, although consumer safety groups have criticized the company for allowing posts they consider to be policy violations.
On Saturday, tweets showing graphic images of people cutting their arms appeared below banners looking for self-harm.
The disappearance of #ThereIsHelp has prompted some consumer safety groups and Twitter users to express concerns about the health of vulnerable platform users.
In part due to pressure from such groups, internet services including Twitter, Alphabet’s Google and Meta’s Facebook have for years tried to direct users to well-known resource providers on safety issues. .
In her email on Friday, Irwin of Twitter said, “Google is really doing well with these things in their search results, and (we’re) really reflecting on some of their approach to the changes we’re making.”
She added, “Google provides highly relevant message reminders based on search terms, they’re always up-to-date and optimized for both mobile and web.”
Eirliani Abdul Rahman, who joined the recently disbanded Twitter content advisory group, said #ThereIsHelp’s disappearance was “extremely disturbing” and that completely removing a feature to improve it was Something unusual.
© Thomson Reuters 2022
