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Twitter has announced that it will stop animating APNG files posted by users so that people with sensitivity to motion and flashing imagery can feel more confident when using the service.
The decision comes just days after the Epilepsy Foundation revealed that its Twitter account had been the target of an attack that used flashing images in a bid to trigger seizures.
Exposure to flashing lights and particular visual patterns can cause seizures in about 3% of those with epilepsy, according to the Epilepsy Foundation. "Photosensitive epilepsy," as it's known, is more common among children and adolescents.
The ability to configure Twitter to prevent videos and GIFs from autoplaying allows those with photosensitive epilepsy to protect themselves from flashing media, whether it's been tweeted innocently or as part of a malicious act. But Twitter Support said this week that Animated PNG files are able to bypass Twitter's autoplay settings, so it's now preventing them from animating when posted.
Twitter said it had made the decision "for the safety of people with sensitivity to motion and flashing imagery, including those with epilepsy."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Thursday December 26 2019, @01:28PM (2 children)
Why is it so hard to configure a browser not to play video? "Block audio and video" under "autoplay" options in Firefox is a joke. Ad blocking does a better job of squashing video autoplay, since so many autoplayed videos are ads. I don't know Chrome as well, but I hear it's even worse. And yeah, the dodge of using an animated image to get around video play blocking works entirely too well. YouTube's latest are, I suppose, thumbnail videos. Just hover over the thumbnail of a video, and now it starts playing a thumbnail sized version.
One way I stumbled over is to run the latest Firefox on a very outdated system such as Ubuntu Linux 12. Then it will complain that the version of libavcodec available has vulnerabilities and should be updated, meanwhile refusing to play video. Woohoo!
Back in the day, to save on bandwidth, there was an option to not load images.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 26 2019, @04:34PM
I /almost/ feel bad suggesting using the needs of epileptics to push for more consistent blocking of autoplaying/auto-animating of anything on the web. Perhaps even make disabled the default, and people have to opt in to the bandwidth wasting eye candy distractions, on a per image/video basis.
Almost.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Thursday December 26 2019, @10:00PM
I have an extension for Chrome that blocks some autoplay videos but not all. At some point its easier to disable javascript on some sites and see how little content is left.