Microblogging platform, Twitter has restored a feature which promotes suicide prevention hotlines and other safety tools. This is for those users who look up certain content, upon coming under pressure from some users and consumer safety groups over its purported removal.
According to Reuters, the feature was taken down a few days ago, mentioning that two people were familiar with the same. They mentioned that this happened after an order from Twitter’s new boss Elon Musk.
After the publication of this story, Twitter’s head of trust and safety Ella Irwin confirmed the removal but at the same time called it temporary.
In an email to Reuters, she further confirmed that the company was fixing relevance, optimising the size of the message prompts and correcting outdated prompts.
Musk, after 15 hours of the original report by Reuters, responded via his Twitter account.
This is what he tweeted:
The feature, which is known as #ThereIsHelp, will come on the top of search results as banners whenever certain topics have been searched. This feature will come with a list of support organisations in several countries for topics like mental health, HIV, vaccines, child sexual exploitation and much more.
It has been reported that last week, the banner returned. Whenever someone searched about suicides and domestic violence, it would come up.
Upon checking for this feature, this feature did not appear.
Last week, users shared several graphic imageries where people were seen cutting their arms which was reportedly seen beneath the banners after the word self-harm was searched.
The disappearance of this feature had led to several Twitter users expressing their concerns about the well-being of vulnerable users on the platform.
Companies like Google and Facebook have for many years tried to direct its users to well-known resource providers for safety issues.
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