Twitter restores feature promoting hotlines for suicide prevention: report

A feature which promoted safety resources, including suicide prevention hotlines, to users searching for certain content was restored by Twitter Inc after it faced heat over its removal from consumer safety groups and few users, saysa Reuters report.A report was published by Reuters on Friday stating that Twitter had removed the feature a few days ago, as it cited two people who knew about the matter saying that the owner of the micro-blogging site Elon Musk had ordered the removal.

After the report was published, the removal of the feature was confirmed by the Twitter head of trust and safety Ella Irwin, who called it a temporary move.

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"We have been fixing and revamping our prompts. They were just temporarily removed while we do that. We expect to have them back up next week," said Irwin in an email sent to Reuters.

After 15 hours of publishing the report, Musk, who initially refused to comment on the matter, tweeted, "False, it is still there". Responding to the criticism received by Twitter users, he added, "Twitter doesn't prevent suicide”.

When a user searched for certain topics, the feature called #ThereIsHelp added a banner at the top of the search results. The feature provided contacts of support organisations related to HIV, child sexual exploitation, mental health, gender-based violence, vaccines, freedom of expression and natural disasters present in many countries.

The removal of the feature led to concerns being raised by some Twitter users and consumer safety groups about the well-being of users of the social media platform.

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Eirliani Abdul Rahman, who was part of Twitter's dissolved content advisory group, said that the removal of #ThereIsHelp was "extremely disconcerting and profoundly disturbing".

Even though it was removed temporarily to bring in improvements, "normally you would be working on it in parallel, not removing it," she added.

(With inputs from agencies)