Epilepsy Foundation
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Twitter blocks animated PNGs to keep trolls from using them to trigger seizures (updated)
Twitter will no longer animate PNG files after trolls hijacked the Epilepsy Foundation's handle and hashtags last month to send potentially seizure-inducing images to epileptic and photo-sensitive individuals. The company says it recently discovered a bug that had allowed people to add multiple animated images to a tweet and bypass Twitter's autoplay protections using the file format. That said, Twitter also says it isn't aware that anyone used APNG to try and trigger seizures; it just wants to avoid the possibility that people do so in the future.
Twitter trolls hijack Epilepsy Foundation hashtags with strobing images
In 2016, a troll deliberately tweeted a rapidly flashing GIF at writer Kurt Eichenwald, who's a known epileptic, to cause a seizure. It unfortunately worked, demonstrating how social media can be weaponized and used to cause bodily harm. Now, the Epilepsy Foundation has revealed that it suffered a series of similar attacks on the platform.
