Elon Musk debunked a Reuters report suggesting the new CEO has ordered the removal of a suicide prevention feature on the social media platform.
"False, it is still there," Musk tweeted early Saturday morning.
Musk also responded directly to a protected Jane Manchun Wong tweet denouncing timing of the alleged removal of Twitter's suicide prevention support feature during Christmas time.
Musk tweeted in reply:
"1. The message is actually still up. This is fake news. 2. Twitter doesn't prevent suicide."
Reuters' report had cited two anonymous sources who said the feature was ordered removed by Musk.
Reuters filed an update saying the feature was restored after its report.
After publication of the story, Twitter head of trust and safety Ella Irwin confirmed the removal and called it temporary.
"We have been fixing and revamping our prompts," Irwin wrote in an email to Reuters. "They were just temporarily removed while we do that.
"We expect to have them back up next week."
The removal of the feature, known as #ThereIsHelp, had not been previously reported. It had shown at the top of specific searches contacts for support organizations in many countries related to mental health, HIV, vaccines, child sexual exploitation, COVID-19, gender-based violence, natural disasters, and freedom of expression.
AIDS United said a webpage the Twitter feature linked to attracted about 70 views a day until Dec. 18. Since then, it has drawn 14 views in total.
Reuters' sources with knowledge of his decision declined to be named because they feared retaliation. One of them said millions of people had encountered #ThereIsHelp messages.
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."
Even if it was only temporarily removed to make way for improvements, "normally you would be working on it in parallel, not removing it," she said.
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 might 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% 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 prioritize child safety."
Information from Reuters was used in this report.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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