There appears to be a new type of annoying animated .GIF on Twitter, a type which this morning somehow managing to get into my totally locked-down and text-only Twitter keyword-search stream.

Currently being used in the wild by Russian Kickstarter spammers and others…

This type of animation was appearing in my search stream despite my having all animated .GIF loading turned off at the browser-root (via Firefox’s about:config control-panel). It seems to have multiple fall-backs, to things like .MP4 and HTML5 video and even static .JPG. Thankfully I have Flash uninstalled, so there’s no fallback to that. I guess that either the .MP4 or the HTML5 loading was bypassing the AdBlock methods I use to block all images posted to Twitter, and also my video-loading blockers.

It’s also armoured against selective page-element blockers, because it has multiple top-layers containing fiddly video controls and buttons. This means that (for Firefox users who use the add-ons AdBlock Plus + Element Hiding Helper for AdBlock Plus to block this sort of page-junk) it’s incredibly difficult to remove via the usual “Select an Element to Hide…” method.

Instead, I had success with right-clicking on the animation itself, selecting the AdBlock option there, then setting the following option as a global block with a * wildcard…

||twitter.com/i/videos/tweet/*

And once that was done, my stream was once again super-easy to quickly scan-by-eye for those few links to genuinely useful content…