Two persons with knowledge of the situation claim that Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter Inc., ordered the removal of a feature that pushed suicide prevention hotlines and other safety resources to users searching for specific material during the previous few days.
Ella Irwin, the director of trust and security at Twitter, stated that “Our prompts have been updated and repaired. They were only taken out of the picture when we did it.”We expect to have them back up next week, she said.
The feature, known as #ThereIsHelp, was removed with no previous notice. It featured connections for support organisations in numerous nations at the top of specialised searches for issues like mental health, HIV, immunisations, child sexual exploitation, COVID-19, gender-based violence, natural disasters, and freedom of expression.
Concerns over the safety of Twitter’s most vulnerable users have grown since its removal. While scholars and civil rights organisations have noted a surge in tweets with racial slurs and other nasty content, Musk has claimed that impressions, or views, of harmful content have decreased since he took charge in October and has posted graphs demonstrating a downward trend.
Internet firms like Twitter, Google, and Facebook have worked for years to point users to well-known resource providers like government hotlines when they believe someone may be in danger, in part owing to pressure from consumer safety groups.
“Google does incredibly well with these in their search results,” Twitter’s Irwin wrote in an email, “and (we) are actually mirroring some of their approach with the adjustments we are making.”
We want to make sure they are operating properly and staying current because we know these prompts are helpful in many situations.
