There are certain conditions present in humans that may affect their everyday lives. It can either assist them in their lives or can be considered as a hindrance. Besides conditions, there are also disorders. You might have heard of dissociative identity disorder. It is most commonly referred to as a split personality disorder. It causes a person to disassociate themselves from their prime personality, thus causing them to revert to an alternate personality.
So, cycling back to conditions, there is one known as Epilepsy. It causes the person to have a seizure if they are exposed to flashing lights. It can also be triggered by bright lights and furiously changing ones too. There are often ways that one can take precautions. If people, with Epilepsy, are warned beforehand, it can greatly reduce the risk of a seizure itself. In light of this, TikTok has announced a new feature for its users!
Epilepsy Warnings
Epilepsy has been kept in perspective in many parts of media and pop culture. When it became a common condition among people, there were innovations done to avoid triggering the effects of Epilepsy. The prime part of this was warning people of flashing lights if they were present in a game or a video. Ubisoft is a company in which this has been long practiced. Every Assassin Creed and Far Cry game has a warning appearing beforehand about flashing lights and strobe lights.
Far Cry 3 was a game that had an immense amount of flashing lights in itself. The starting sequence had such lights in a disco setting and that is also why such a warning was important. Assassin’s Creed games had flashing and flickering lights on screen when the ‘Animus’ was being shown. Similar to games, TikTok has announced a new feature that allows epileptic users to skip videos.
The TikTok Feature:
The feature allows a user to skip every video which can appear on their feed with epileptic content. Once it is turned on, the feed of the user will be optimized in accordance. They will no longer receive videos on their feed that have epilepsy triggering elements in them. This feature became a dire necessity after recent events.
Recently, a challenge became famous on the platform, which encouraged the idea of epilepsy itself. The challenge asked people to mimic the effects of epilepsy on camera while lights flashed in the video everywhere. Not only was this taken as offensive, but it was also considered highly unethical. In light of that, too, the UK epilepsy society expressed their praise for announcing this feature.
A Healthy Progress
This is a step in the right direction of progress. It shows that awareness is setting on many media platforms too. Before, it was exercised in games and movies. Now it’s being extended to one of the most widely used platforms of this generation. This is significant because of a substantial amount of users on TikTok with photosensitive epilepsy. Statistics showed that out of 3.7 Million daily active users, 240 000 experienced photosensitive epilepsy.
We hope other platforms also continue to grasp the awareness of epilepsy and take precautions as necessary. It will be considered quite beneficial for the entire community in general.
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