Twitter partners with Nadma and Mercy Malaysia to raise disaster preparedness in Malaysia

Nadma acknowledged the partnership in a tweet on its official page, sharing hopes that the #ThereIsHelp efforts would encourage the involvement of all parties in disaster management. — LOW BOON TAT/The Star

While Twitter's #ThereIsHelp initiative is nothing new – prompts for suicide prevention, vaccinations, and domestic violence were added as far back as 2020 – the social media platform is now including additional prompts relating to natural disasters for users in Malaysia.

Through a partnership with the National Disaster Management Agency Malaysia (Nadma) and Mercy Malaysia, searches on the platform that include certain disaster-related keywords will show a notification that links to the official Nadma Twitter page and the donation page for Mercy Malaysia.

According to Monrawee Ampolpittayanant, Twitter's head of public policy and philanthropy for South-East Asia, the initiative is meant to provide reliable information during times of need.

"Our core objective of launching this #ThereIsHelp notification search prompt is to truly help shorten the search time and to provide timely access to credible information from our partners to those in need.

"We hope this notification service can serve as a means to help the Indonesian and Malaysian public, as well as government and non-government stakeholders, navigate the extreme weather that the monsoon season brings, in along with other unprecedented disaster events," she wrote on Twitter's official blog.

Nadma acknowledged the partnership in a tweet on its official page, sharing hopes that the #ThereIsHelp efforts would encourage the involvement of all parties in disaster management.

Dalam memastikan #KeluargaMalaysiaSiagaBencana, NADMA & Twitter bekerjasama menerusi #ThereIsHelp untuk notifikasi carian info terkini dan sahih. Semoga amalan terbaik ini menggalakkan penglibatan semua pihak dalam pengurusan bencana. #KesiapsiagaanBencanaTanggungjawabBersama — NADMA Malaysia (@mynadma) October 27, 2022

The service is available in the Twitter app on both iOS and Android, as well as on its website.

From our testing, searches containing keywords in Bahasa Malaysia such as banjir and gempa bumi made the information panel appear. However, this was not the case when equivalent terms in English were used.

"When people search for keywords associated with a natural disaster in Indonesia and Malaysia, the top search result will now include a notification in Bahasa Indonesia as well as Bahasa Malaysia, encouraging them to click through to credible information and support provided by our partners," the company wrote.

Currently, there are over 300 #ThereIsHelp prompts in 41 languages available around the world, covering issues such as freedom of expression, mental health, child sexual exploitation, and disaster response.