By Paresh Dave, Fanny Potkin and Sheila Dang
(Reuters) – Twitter Inc in recent days removed a feature that promoted suicide prevention hotlines and other safety resources to users seeking certain content, according to two people familiar with the matter who said it was commissioned by new owner Elon Musk.
After the story was published, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, told Reuters in an email that “we’ve fixed and rearranged our prompts. They’ve just been temporarily removed while we we do”.
“We expect to get them back next week,” she said.
The removal of the feature, known as #ThereIsHelp, had not previously been reported. It had shown at the top specific searches of contacts of support organizations in many countries related to mental health, HIV, vaccines, child sexual exploitation, COVID-19, gender-based violence, natural disasters and freedom of expression.
Its removal had raised concerns about the welfare of vulnerable users on Twitter. Musk said impressions or opinions of harmful content have been declining since he took office in October and tweeted graphs showing a downward trend, even as researchers and civil rights groups followed by an increase in tweets with racial slurs and other hateful content.
Partly under pressure from consumer safety groups, internet services such as Twitter, Google and Facebook have tried for years to direct users to well-known resource providers such as government hotlines when they suspect someone is in danger.
In his email, Twitter’s Irwin said, “Google is doing really well with these search results and (we) are actually reflecting some of their approach with the changes we’re making.”
She added, “We know these prompts are useful in many cases and we just want to make sure they work properly and stay relevant.”
Eirliani Abdul Rahman, who was part of a recently disbanded Twitter content advisory group, said the disappearance of #ThereIsHelp was “extremely disconcerting and deeply disturbing”.
Although it was only temporarily removed to make room for improvements, “normally you would work on it in parallel, not removing it,” she said.
Washington-based AIDS United, which has been promoted in #ThereIsHelp, and iLaw, a Thai group mentioned for supporting free speech, both told Reuters on Friday that the feature’s disappearance surprised them.
AIDS United said a webpage to which the Twitter feature was linked drew around 70 views a day through December 21. 18. Since then, he has shot 14 shots in total.
Damar Juniarto, executive director of Twitter partner Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network, tweeted about the missing feature on Friday and said “foolish actions” by the social media service could lead his organization to abandon it.
Sources with knowledge of Musk’s decision to order the feature removed declined to be named because they feared retaliation. One said millions of people had encountered #ThereIsHelp messages.
Twitter launched prompts about five years ago and some were available in more than 30 countries, according to the company’s tweets. In one of its blog posts on the feature, Twitter said it had a responsibility to ensure users can “access and receive support on our service when they need it most.”
Alex Goldenberg, senior intelligence analyst at the nonprofit Network Contagion Research Institute, said prompts that showed up in search results just days ago were no longer visible on Thursday.
He and his colleagues published a study in August showing that monthly Twitter mentions of certain terms associated with self-harm increased by more than 500% from around the previous year, with young users being particularly at risk when they see such content.
“If this decision is emblematic of a change in policy that they no longer take these issues seriously, that’s extremely dangerous,” Goldenberg said. “This goes against Musk’s previous commitments to put the safety of children first.”
Musk said he wanted to tackle child abuse content on Twitter and criticized the former owner’s handling of the issue. But it cut off much of the teams involved in dealing with potentially objectionable material.
(Reporting by Paresh Dave, Fanny Potkin and Sheila Dang; Editing by Kenneth Li and Daniel Wallis)
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