After Being Deleted, Twitter Brings Back the Suicide Prevention Feature After Users Protested

Illustration. (Photo: Unsplash)

JAKARTA - After protests from its users, Twitter has finally returned its suicide prevention feature and other sources of safety information when searching for certain content, dubbed #ThereIsHelp.

The #ThereIsHelp feature places a banner at the top of search results for certain topics and lists the contacts of organizations in various countries dealing with mental health, HIV, vaccines, child sexual exploitation, COVID-19, gender-based violence, natural disasters and freedom of expression.

Reuters reported that Twitter had removed the feature from its platform earlier this week, at the behest of Twitter's new CEO Elon Musk.

After the news went viral, Twitter's head of trust and security, Ella Irwin, confirmed the company had removed the feature but said it was only temporary.

“We have refined and updated our leads. They were only moved temporarily while we were doing that. We look forward to having them back next week," said Irwin.

"Google did really well with this in their search results and (we) will really reflect some of their approach with the changes we make. We know these prompts are useful in many cases and just want to make sure they work well and continue to be relevant ," he added.

One day later, Musk later denied that his social media had ever removed the feature, “This is fake news,” Musk tweeted on his Twitter.

With the feature's disappearance, several consumer safety groups and Twitter users have expressed concern about the well-being of vulnerable users on the platform.

Former member of Twitter's recently disbanded Trust and Safety board, Eirliani Abdul Rahman said she found the events very confusing and disturbing.

Rahman also pointed out that companies usually work on safety features in parallel and leave existing features before replacing them.

"Usually you'd work on them in parallel, not delete them," says Rahman.

Citing The Guardian, Sunday, December 25, in one of its blog posts about the #ThereIsHelp feature, Twitter stated that it is responsible for ensuring users can access and receive support for the service when they need it most.

For information, this feature has been expanded to display information related to the search for natural disasters in Indonesia and Malaysia.