How to avoid flashing lights and photosensitive videos on TikTok

Here’s how to make your For You Page safer if you’re sensitive to flashing lights. 

While TikTok’s curated For You Page provides an endless supply of content, users can unintentionally stumble across videos with intense visuals. Flashing lights may be detrimental for those with certain health conditions like migraines and sensory processing disorders, and may trigger a seizure in epileptic viewers. 

An estimated 65 million people in the world have epilepsy, and according to the Epilepsy Foundation, one in 26 Americans will develop epilepsy at some point in their life.

“For the people with photosensitive epilepsy, exposure to flashing lights at certain intensities or to certain visual patterns can trigger seizures,” Epilepsy Foundation president Laura Thrall said in a statement with TikTok. “While the population of those with photosensitive epilepsy is small, the impact can be quite serious.” 

In an effort to make its platform more accessible for affected users, TikTok added features in late 2020 to to filter out photosensitive videos. At the advice of epilepsy advocates, TikTok now warns users before showing photosensitive content that may trigger seizures, and now gives them the option to skip all photosensitive videos in the future. 

If you didn’t tap “Skip all” the first time you received a warning for photosensitive content, or if you want to scroll through your For You Page uninterrupted, you can also manually toggle the filter. Here’s how to turn off photosensitive content on TikTok.

1. Go to your profile tab 

First, go to your profile tab. You can access this by tapping the “Me” icon on the far right corner of the menu bar at the bottom of your screen. 

2. Navigate to the Setting and privacy page

Next, tap the three dots in the upper right corner of the screen, which will take you to the “Settings and privacy” menu. Scroll down to find “Accessibility” under “Content & Activity.”

Tapping “Accessibility” will bring you to a menu where you can turn on animated thumbnails, filter photosensitive videos, and turn on closed captioning. To avoid flashing lights on your For You Page, toggle the switch to the right of “Remove photosensitive videos” from off to on. 

The switch should be green after you tap it.

That’s all it takes to avoid photosensitive content on TikTok!