Twitter Inc. removed a feature in the past few days that promoted suicide prevention hotlines and other safety resources to users looking up certain content, according to two people familiar with the matter who said it was ordered by new owner Elon Musk. Musk, however, denied this.
In response to the report on Twitter removing suicide prevention feature, Musk wrote that the “message is actually still up” and that “Twitter doesn’t prevent suicide”.
1. The message is actually still up. This is fake news.
2. Twitter doesn’t prevent suicide.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 24, 2022
This, however, stands in contrast to what Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, said. She did confirm the removal, but called it temporary. “We have been fixing and revamping our prompts. They were just temporarily removed while we did that,” Irwin said in an email to Reuters. “We expect to have them back up next week.”
The removal of the feature, known as #ThereIsHelp, has not been previously reported. It has shown at the top of specific searches contacts for support organisations in many countries related to mental health, HIV, vaccines, child sexual exploitation, COVID-19, gender-based violence, natural disasters and freedom of expression.
Its elimination caused concerns about the well-being of vulnerable users on Twitter.
Musk has said that impressions, or views, of harmful content are declining since he took over in October and has tweeted graphs showing a downward trend, even as researchers and civil rights groups have tracked an increase in tweets with racial slurs and other hateful content.
Washington-based AIDS United, which was promoted in #ThereIsHelp, and iLaw, a Thai group mentioned for freedom of expression support, both told Reuters on Friday that the disappearance of the feature was a surprise to them.
AIDS United said a webpage that the Twitter feature linked to attracted about 70 views a day until December 18. Since then, it has drawn 14 views in total.
’Stupid actions’
Damar Juniarto, executive director at Twitter partner Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network, tweeted on Friday about the missing feature and said “stupid actions” by the social media service could lead his organisation to abandon it.
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.”
In part due to pressure from consumer safety groups, internet services including Twitter, Google and Facebook have for years tried to direct users to well-known resource providers such as government hotlines when they suspect someone may be in danger.
Twitter had launched some prompts about five years ago and some had been available in over 30 countries, according to company tweets. In one of its blog posts about the feature, Twitter had said it had responsibility to ensure users could “access and receive support on our service when they need it most.”
Just as Musk bought the company, the feature was expanded to show information related to natural disaster searches in Indonesia and Malaysia.
Alex Goldenberg, lead intelligence analyst at the non-profit Network Contagion Research Institute, said prompts that had shown in search results just days ago were no longer visible by Thursday.
He and colleagues in August published a study showing that monthly mentions on Twitter of some terms associated with self-harm increased by over 500 percent from about the year before, with younger users particularly at risk when seeing such content.
“If this decision is emblematic of a policy change that they no longer take these issues seriously, that’s extraordinarily dangerous,” Goldenberg said. “It runs counter Musk’s previous commitments to prioritise child safety.”
Musk has said he wants to combat child porn on Twitter and has criticised the previous ownership’s handling of the issue. But he has cut large portions of the teams involved in dealing with potentially objectionable material.