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Epilepsy Patient Assaulted Via Twitter

posted by cmn32480 on Sunday December 18 2016, @06:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the physical-assault-in-a-virtual-world dept.

FakeBeldin writes:

Newsweek journalist Kurt Eichenwald, who is known to be suffering from epilepsy, reported on twitter that someone tweeted him a seizure-inducing image. This is not the first time it happened, but this attempt was (apparently) successful in triggering a seizure.

This might be the first physical attack on a person perpetrated via the internet. A sad point in history, in my view.

Links: coverage from Ars Technica, Eichenwald's Twitter feed. I'm not linking to the offending image - you're big enough to find it on your own and apparently it is quite horrible even for people who do not suffer from epilepsy.

Eichenwald has tweeted that he is involving law enforcement.

Any ideas on how hard it would be to filter out seizure-inducing media (make it click-to-view/play)?

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Guppy on Monday December 19 2016, @01:35AM

    by Guppy (3213) on Monday December 19 2016, @01:35AM (#442890)

    This might be the first physical attack on a person perpetrated via the internet. A sad point in history, in my view.

    Back in 2008, some trolls raided an epilepsy forum, succeeding in triggering some seizures:
    http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/news/2008/03/epilepsy [wired.com]

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  • (Score: 1) by i286NiNJA on Monday December 19 2016, @04:13PM

    by i286NiNJA (2768) on Monday December 19 2016, @04:13PM (#443182)

    Look this is a journalist, they decide what is noteworthy. It's funny that even after being possibly killed over the internet he can't resist the temptation to self promote.
    The same amount of time it would have taken for him to type "Oh I'm possibly noteworthy. please people in the future talk about me" is about the same amount of time it would have taken for him to discover that this is a common problem on the internet.