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. Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, confirmed the removal and called it temporary. Irwin said: “We have been fixing and revamping our prompts. They were just temporarily removed while we do that. We expect to have them back up next week.” Irwin said: “Google does really well with these in their search results and [we] are actually mirroring some of their approach with the changes we are making.” She added: “We know these prompts are useful in many cases and just want to make sure they are functioning properly and continue to be relevant.” Musk, who did not initially respond to requests for comment about the removal, had tweeted: “False, it is still there.” In response to criticism by Twitter users, the billionaire also wrote that “Twitter doesn’t prevent suicide.” The initial removal had led some consumer safety groups and Twitter users to express concerns about the wellbeing of vulnerable users on the platform. 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”. She added even if it was only temporarily removed to make way for improvements, “normally you would be working on it in parallel, not removing it”. 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. The entrepreneur has also declared he wants to combat child abuse imagery on Twitter and has criticised the previous ownership’s handling of the issue. But he has reduced large portions of the teams involved in dealing with potentially objectionable material. 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 #ThereIsHelp 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.