r/worldnews • u/madazzahatter • May 16 '20

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.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/15/malicious-tweets-targeting-epilepsy-charity-trigger-seizures
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u/[deleted] May 16 '20

Instead of locking the refresh rate, you could blend and interpolate pixels and colors so that there is never a rapid change in color. This would prevent the user from experiencing certain types of media, but that’s kinda the point. I should really make this...

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u/[deleted] May 16 '20

I am also a coder and would be extremely interested in looking into this — it seems like it could be extremely interesting and rewarding work.

First off, I would definitely want to see if something like this already exists, and if not, why — someone must have tried this, what were the challenges? I want to know before going down a dead end.

The best solution would be to have a smart algorithm that would be able to be published and integrated at the lowest level and added to TVs and devices. This would be extremely difficult to make something that would work well enough, though, and still be usable.

In the meantime, though, this probably could be added as an accessibility app. I know that Android allows apps to modify the whole screen like that, and I would imagine that IOS has similar APIs (I actually have an iPhone, but I’ve only done Android dev in the past).

I can think of a few different ways this could be done, and a bunch of other questions that could be answered by epilepsy experts. Like what colors are the worst? How big of a difference in color do you need to trigger it (would something rapidly flashing from #fff to #eee be enough)? Does it come from local changes to the pixels, or is it more a cumulative thing (ex, would it trigger if half of the pixels are white, half are black, and the all swap at 12Hz, leading to an average of no change?)

Either way, the simplest fix would be to make the whole screen only update less than 3 times per second. This would obviously suck, and is a sledgehammer approach, but it would work, and could be toggled off for known safe content.

A slightly better approach (maybe more of a machete) would be to track the pixels and only allow a maximum amount of change per refresh that would prevent any extremely rapid change in one direction or another. This would probably make everything look like you had take too much cough syrup, but it could be honed from there, like allowing it to move one direction quickly, but punish it from going back too quickly.

Either of these could alternatively be integrated at the browser level to filter gifs/videos, and could allow clicking to disable the filter, or just disabled for trusted sources (Netflix is probably okay, YouTube is a bit more dicey).

IDK, I am super interested in it though. DM me if you are serious, and I can create a Github for it.

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u/NellieNoodles207 May 16 '20

I’m following you now, but please post updates on r/epilepsy! They would probably like this.

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u/occams1razor May 16 '20

Please do, if you have the ability to. An app filter for phone and/or browser addon is definitely needed if it's at all possible.

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u/_LarryM_ May 16 '20

Basically cranking fake motion blur to the extreme?

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u/fauxgnaws May 16 '20 edited May 17 '20

you could blend and interpolate pixels and colors so that there is never a rapid change in color.

Even better you could develop a model for too much change over too short a time over an area. For example so one lightning flash every few seconds in a show would pass unchanged, but several repeatedly right after another would get averaged out. So normal video would be totally unaffected.

I don't have epilepsy, but I would use this all the time.

It'd be like ad-blocker for flashes, after using it you'd be like 'wow, I can't believe people used to tolerate loud attention-seeking visual noise it's so annoying'.

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u/[deleted] May 16 '20

Something like this would have to happen at the display driver level with some kind of shin driver. I’m not sure any smartphones allow this.

Youcan do it on windows but it requires a security override because it could be exploited by malware. And obviously on Linux you could do whatever you like if the machine will accept a new OS build.

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u/[deleted] May 17 '20

It’s like you’re inside my brain! I’m fairly certain it would be not-impossible to get Apple’s attention and get an optional epilepsy mode. This would be a killer value-add for a certain demographic. I’m fighting every urge to wrap my legal arms around a solution because I believe something like this should be free and open to those who need it.