Twitter adds suicide prevention feature

Twitter has restored a feature that advertises suicide prevention hotlines, Reuters reports. According to media reports, last Friday, December 23, Elon Musk allegedly ordered the removal of the #ThereIsHelp option, which sent socially important information to users when they searched for relevant content.

Ella Irwin, the social network’s head of trust and security, confirmed the removal, but called it temporary. She said: «Twitter has been tweaking relevance, optimizing the size of message tooltips, and fixing outdated guides. We know they’re useful, we didn’t have a goal to stop them permanently. We expect to have them back up and running next week.»

The #ThereIsHelp feature places a banner at the top of search results for specific topics. It contains contacts of organizations in many countries around the world that provide assistance in the areas of mental health, HIV, vaccination, prevention of child sexual exploitation, COVID-19, and freedom of speech. Interestingly, on Saturday, the banner returned to search queries about suicide and domestic violence under the hashtag #shtwt, an acronym for «self-harm Twitter.»

Musk has previously stated that the number of impressions or views of harmful content has been declining since he took over the company in October. Instead, civil rights and liberties researchers have been tracking an increase in the number of tweets with racial slurs and other hateful content.

As a reminder, the European Union recently threatened to block Musk’s Twitter account in the eurozone if the billionaire continues to tolerate a policy of strict censorship and biased attitudes toward content. Earlier, Musk threatened to publish «Twitter files» that allegedly contain evidence against the platform’s previous CEOs who suppressed freedom of speech on the social network. Eventually, he did so.