Elon Musk the social media platform’s new owner was order to remove the suicide prevention hotlines and other safety resources to users looking up certain content.
After publication of the story, Twitter head of trust and safety Ella Irwin confirmed the removal and called it temporary.
Twitter was “fixing relevance, optimizing the size of the message prompts and correcting outdated prompts,” ÂIrwin said in an email. “We know they are useful and our intent was not to have them down permanently.”
In response by Twitter users, the billionaire also tweeted “Twitter doesn’t prevent sucide”.
The initial removal had led some consumer safety groups and Twitter’s users to express concerns about the wellbeing of vulnerable users on the platform.
Eirliani Abdul Rahman, who had been on a recently dissolved Twitter content advisory group, said the disappearance of #ThereIsHelp was “extremely disconcerting and profoundly disturbing”. She added even if it was only temporarily removed to make way for improvements, “normally you would be working on it in parallel, not removing it”.
This disappearance of #ThereIsHelp had led some Twitter users to express their concerns
By Saturday, the banner returned to searches about suicide and domestic violence in multiple countries under terms like “shtwt,” shorthand for “self-harm Twitter”. Tweets showing graphic imagery of people cutting their arms appeared beneath banners on searches for self-harm. This disappearance of #ThereIsHelp had led some Twitter users to express their concerns about the vulnerability of the platform itself.Â
Irwin did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.
In response Twitter bans users from encouraging self-harm, though consumer safety groups have criticized the company for allowing posts that they say violate the policy.
For the past few months, Internet services like Google have tried to direct their users to well-known resource providers for the safety issue. In her email Twitter’s Irwin said, “Google does really well with these in their search results and (we) are actually mirroring some of their approach with the changes we are making.”
While it’s good to see that the feature is back on the platform after only being gone for a day, some are concerned as to why it was removed at all. Eirliani Abdul Rahman, who was up until recently part of an advisory group for Twitter, said that a feature being removed before it was revamped was unusual.
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