Twitter restores suicide prevention feature

Twitter has restored a feature that promoted suicide prevention hotlines and support groups after its CEO Elon Musk was criticised over their removal.

The feature, known as #ThereIsHelp, placed a banner at the top of search results for certain topics and listed contacts for organisations in numerous countries related to mental health, HIV, vaccines, child sexual exploitation, Covid-19, gender-based violence, natural disasters and freedom of expression.

Reuters reported on Friday that the feature was taken down a few days ago.

The initial removal had led some consumer safety groups and Twitter users to express concerns about the wellbeing of vulnerable users on the platform.

Musk has previously said that impressions, or views, of harmful content are declining since he took over the company 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.

Twitter had launched some prompts about five years ago and some had been available in over 30 countries, according to company tweets.

Just as Musk bought the company, the feature was expanded to show information related to natural disaster searches in Indonesia and Malaysia.