Earlier this year, a Cork influencer used Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses to film a young woman while paramedics treated her on the ground. The video went up as content. TikTok pulled it for harmful behavior. Meta left it live. The woman in the video did not consent to any of it, and the influencer called it a prank.
That word, prank, is doing a lot of work it has not earned. A prank has a target who can eventually laugh. Filming someone in a medical emergency, unconscious or seizing or in pain, and posting it for engagement is not a prank. It is exploitation with a caption.
The Platform Gap Is the Real Problem
TikTok's removal of that Cork video is the right call, but it is also the exception that proves the rule. The same influencer had a prior video removed for violating adult sexual abuse rules. That is not a creator who slipped up once; that is a pattern TikTok tolerated until it became impossible to ignore. And Meta, which made the glasses that captured the footage, kept the video up entirely. Two platforms, same content, opposite decisions. That inconsistency is not a policy disagreement. It is a consent gap that victims fall through.
Terry Prone put it plainly: the acceptability of a prank depends on the status of the victim. That framing is honest in a way most platform statements are not. When the victim is vulnerable, when they are mid-seizure or mid-crisis, the power imbalance is total. The creator has a camera and an audience. The subject has neither.
I will grant the counterargument one fair point: not all medical-adjacent prank content is predatory. Labor filter videos, where a partner pranks a pregnant spouse with a fake contraction app, have pulled 15 million views and, when pre-consented, cause no real harm. Consent is the variable. The problem is that consent becomes invisible when creators film strangers in public crises and claim the street as a free-filming zone.
Stigma Does Not Need a Boost
Epilepsy is a useful case study because the stigma is already measurable. A seizure costs someone their driving license. It can cost them a job. EastEnders and Coronation Street have both run storylines this spring showing characters mocked mid-seizure, medication confiscated in detention, a post-seizure driver told by another character, "You could have killed someone." The soaps are depicting what actually happens to people. When a TikTok prank films a seizure and the comments fill with shock-reaction emojis, it adds one more data point to the cultural record that says: this is entertainment.
Chantal Spittles at Epilepsy Action described the detention medication scenario as "the sad reality for many, who've been treated really poorly." Viral prank content does not create that reality, but it reinforces it, and reinforcement has consequences.
The Cork retail worker filmed without consent at her job called it a "major violation" and asked for stricter laws on smart glasses. She is right, and the ask is specific enough to act on. Smart glasses with cameras need the same consent standards as any other recording device in a public-facing context. That is not a radical position. It is the minimum.
What I want is simple and enforceable: every major platform should ban the posting of footage that shows an identifiable person receiving emergency medical care without documented prior consent. Not a community guideline buried in a help article. A hard rule with consistent removal. TikTok already proved it can do this. Meta needs to catch up, and legislators in Ireland and the UK need to stop waiting for platforms to self-regulate something they have already shown they will not.
The woman on the ground in Cork did not sign up to be content. That should be the end of the argument.
