Twitter Is Revamping Its Suicide Prevention Feature And Security Hotlines (Updated)

Viewers and critics were quick to point out a few missing features from the Twitter app recently. But thankfully, the platform was quick enough to provide a justification as to why you can no longer see its suicide prevention and security hotlines.

The company mentioned how it’s currently on a mission to revamp its security and protective offerings for its users that turn to the app for searching a certain type of content. The news was recently confirmed by two individuals that were familiar with the matter. They claim it was a part of direct orders from Elon Musk.

After this particular story was published, the company’s lead for trust and safety mentioned to Reuters through email that they’ve been fixing and changing various prompts and for that reason, they’ve removed it temporarily. As far as when it’s going to return, well, they hope to see it making a stronger comeback by next week.

Deleting such a feature which is better know by the hashtag, #ThereIsHelp was not reported by anyone in the past. We used to see it make it to the top of the list in terms of specific searches for contact or firms in different nations.

It’s linked to the likes of mental health, vaccines, HIV, and other leading issues like COVID, child abuse, natural calamities, violence linked to gender, and also the ideology of expressing your thoughts freely.

Therefore, such an elimination has caused an increase in the number of concerns about the health of those that are vulnerable on the Twitter platform. Moreover, we’ve seen Elon Musk detail how views and impressions regarding such content is decreasing ever since he took over in October of this year.

He’s even gone one step forward to display graphs outlining the declining trend as experts and groups advocating for civil rights track down the upward rise in tweets entailing racial slurs and plenty of hate.

Let’s not forget how a lot of pressure comes from the likes of safety groups of consumers and various internet service providers and apps like Google and Facebook. These have for so many years doing a great job at directing users to resource providers like hotlines of the government whenever they suspect a person might be in danger.

Twitter’s head for trust and security also took a moment to praise Google for its efforts in this regard. She said that the search engine giant really does a wonderful job in terms of search results and that’s why Twitter is getting inspiration and following in a similar mannerism.

Twitter says that it’s not hoping to bring any major changes at the moment. But what it does hope is to ensure that the prompts getting introduced are not only relevant but also functional to benefit users on the platform.

But that is not holding back some critics from speaking their minds on the matter. According to them, it’s quite concerning to see the features disappear as a whole, not to mention how disturbing such behavior can be from a leading platform on social media.

Update: As per Reuters, Twitter has restored the feature "that promotes suicide prevention hotlines and other safety resources to users looking up certain content, after coming under pressure from some users and consumer safety groups over its removal." 


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