Fool Me Once

Kurt Eichenwald might want to think twice about his current legal moves.

Eichenwald is currently preparing a lawsuit against an as-yet unidentified person for a Tweet that allegedly caused Eichenwald, a epileptic, a seizure. The much published journalist's plight is covered in this BBC News article, which then links to a second article in which he describes a second situation where he says he was put into the same situation.

Let's get this clear, absolute, it's not OK to send nasty things to people. But, if they are being sent, it's not normal behaviour to keep on looking at them either. If there's a car crash in the opposite lane you shouldn't stop and get a selfie.

As an epileptic, he appears to have broadly followed decent guidelines. In Twitter, videos are usually turned on by default - as they are in Facebook. However, seemingly in both cases, he has chosen to click on the videos and let them play.

I received a tweet from someone with the twitter handle “Mike's Deplorable AF.”

Was his first reported attack. The video came from someone he didn't know and, according to the Newsweek article referenced by the BBC, was in the context of being against his writings about Trump.

He chose to open the video.

The video was some sort of strobe light, with flashing circles and images of Pepe flying toward the screen. It’s what’s called epileptogenic—something that triggers seizures. Fortunately, since I was standing, I simply dropped my iPad to the ground the second I realized what Mike had done. It landed face down on the bathroom floor.

That incident was written about just five months ago, yet Eichenwald subsequently chose to again view a video he received this past week. It's unclear whether he had a new device and had failed to turn off automatic play of videos, but he chose to play the video again from an unknown source.

This is not going to happen again. My wife is terrified. I am... disgusted.

I'm not 100% certain what he should be disgusted at. People who don't like his work are sending him things that he has the ability to not see. Or that he can't - or won't - stop seeing them.

Eichenwald has over 47,000 tweets to his name and over 233,000 followers. Hardy a man that can be classed as a Twitter amateur. On December 16th, he told followers he wouldn't be seeing comments or tweeting 'for a while'. Three days later he has identified a string of 'sociopathic Trump followers', as he called one, that are supposedly revelling in his anguish - offering to contact several at their workplaces he had identified from social media.

Bush Jnr did the 'Fool Me Once' line badly. I'm not sure that having a very public - and quite worrying - reaction is going to help Eichenwald's cause in this case, given the class of the 'enemy'.