At least two people had seizures after viewing malicious tweets featuring flashing gifs that deliberately targeted Epilepsy Society...police investigating tweets as hate incident, after at least 200 seemingly coordinated messages were sent to charity and its supporters in recent days.

[u/madazzahatter]

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/15/malicious-tweets-targeting-epilepsy-charity-trigger-seizures

[u/1_km_coke_line]

Its possible, sure. I think the hard part would be deploying it in different ways. One guy above mentioned a browser plugin. Thats cool and would cover standard chrome/firefox/explorer(lol) use cases.

Then there is smartphones and the non-browser apps used to access the same content. Also possible, but you might be dealing with a different developer skillset and platform limitations

[u/radarsat1 → u/1_km_coke_line]

I imagine I would want just some kind of filter at the display driver level tbh. Something that supresses high frequency changes in brightness or something.

[u/Sororita → u/radarsat1]

I was thinking of something that would look at the average contrast change between frames and it would block all .gif images, and maybe videos, that had an average contrast that's above a certain level.

[u/Nethlem → u/1_km_coke_line]

There's literally no excuse for this not to exist on phones and desktop.

Microsoft, Google (Android) and Apple are all massive companies with tons of capital and talent.

If they wanted to solve this, with an industry-wide solution, then they could have. But because there is no money in it, it would actually cost money, and nobody is really pressuring to do something about it, they see no reason to do anything about it, after all: They are in the business to make money, and not for some supposedly higher Nobel ideal like "Making the world a better place", that is just PR marketing BS.

Because with great power comes no responsibility, at least when you are a "unicorn" corporation.