Twitter Inc. removed a feature in the previous couple of days that promoted suicide prevention hotlines and other safety resources to users looking for certain content, based on two people acquainted with the matter, who said it was commissioned by the recent owner, Elon Musk.
The removal of the feature, referred to as #ThereIsHelp, has not been previously reported. At the top of specific searches, it showed contacts to support organizations in lots of countries related to mental health, HIV, vaccines, child sexual abuse, COVID-19, gender-based violence, natural disasters and freedom of speech.
Its elimination may increase concerns for the well-being of vulnerable Twitter users. Musk said impressions or views of harmful content have been declining since he took power in October, and he posted charts on Twitter showing a downward trend, at the same time as researchers and civil rights groups noted a rise in tweets of racist slurs and other hateful content.
Twitter and Musk didn’t reply to requests for comment on the feature’s removal.
The Washington-based organization AIDS United, which was promoted in #ThereIsHelp, and iLaw, a Thai group mentioned for supporting free speech, told Reuters on Friday that the disappearance of the feature got here as a surprise to them.
AIDS United reported that the website linked to by the Twitter feature was attracting around 70 views a day by December 18. It has since gained a complete of 14 views.
Damar Juniarto, executive director of Twitter’s Southeast Asia partner Freedom of Expression Network, tweeted on Friday about the missing feature and said the social network’s “silly actions” may lead his organization to ditch it.
Reuters couldn’t immediately determine why Musk ordered the removal of the feature. Sources acquainted with his decision declined to be named because they feared retaliation. One said that hundreds of thousands of people have been exposed to #ThereIsHelp messages.
Eirliani Abdul Rahman, who was a member of the recently disbanded Twitter content advisory group, said the disappearance of #ThereIsHelp was “extremely disturbing and deeply disturbing.”
Even when it was only temporarily removed to make room for improvements, “normally you would be working on it in parallel reasonably than deleting it,” she said.
Partly as a result of pressure from consumer safety groups, online services including Twitter, Google and Facebook have for years tried to direct users to known resource providers, similar to government hotlines, when they believe someone could also be at risk.
Twitter launched some prompts about five years ago, and a few were available in greater than 30 countries, based on the company’s tweets. In a single of its blog posts about the feature, Twitter said it has a responsibility to make sure users “access and receive support on our service after they need it most.”
When Musk bought the company, the feature was expanded to display information related to disaster searches in Indonesia and Malaysia.
Alex Goldenberg, principal intelligence analyst at the non-profit Network Contagion Research Institute, said the prompts that appeared in search results just just a few days ago will not be visible until Thursday.
He and colleagues in August published a study showing that monthly Twitter mentions of certain self-harm terms increased by greater than 500% over the previous 12 months, with younger users being particularly in danger of seeing such content.
“If this decision is an emblem of a change in policy that they aren’t any longer taking these issues seriously, that is amazingly dangerous,” Goldenberg said. “Starts the counter [to] Musk’s previous commitments to prioritize the safety of children.”
Musk said he desired to fight child pornography on Twitter and criticized the way the previous owner handled the issue. Nevertheless it cut off a big chunk of the teams involved in coping with potentially objectionable material.