FaceApp
In recent months, FaceApp has been a fun app you’ve probably seen on your social media feeds, letting you and your friends morph faces to look older, younger, or smiling when you frown. You can even see what you’d look like if you presented as another gender (with this last feature often proving a little problematic in and of itself). And a brand-new feature from the app has landed the company in even more hot water online.
The app just added ethnicity filters, which morphs your face into what the app deems Asian, black, Caucasian, and Indian ethnicities. Yes, this involves lightening or darkening your skin, plus altering your facial features and hair texture to fit ethnic stereotypes. Here are a few shots of the filters in action.
This clearly did not go over well online. Some people on Twitter were quick to call the new filters racist, compare it to blackface (and brownface and yellowface), and just a bad idea all around.
Everyone loves FaceApp, the phone app that adds smiles and wrinkles to your friends' faces!
We regret to inform you that FaceApp is racist pic.twitter.com/2tRSlcfWdc — Jennifer Unkle (@jbu3) August 9, 2017
(FaceApp board meeting)
"Our app is popular."
(Everyone nods)
"What if it could be more popular?"
(Everyone leans in)
"Get this: racism." — Good Tweetman (@Goodtweet_man) August 9, 2017
The whole internet loves faceapp, the lovely app that swaps gender!
5 weeks later pic.twitter.com/3rHHo6RQmz — Casey (@caseymerwin) August 9, 2017
#FaceApp now with digital blackface! Complete with dark skin, thick lips and a broad nose!
Once again black face is not ok! FFS! 😡 pic.twitter.com/R7GQoN8gsT — Leon Alleyne (@leon_alleyne) August 9, 2017
And this isn’t the first time the app has seen backlash online. Mic reports that FaceApp pulled a “hot” filter that appeared to lighten your skin. The company apologized, calling the effect an unintended consequence of the app’s technology, rather than a planned feature.
#faceapp isn't' just bad it's also racist...🔥 filter=bleach my skin and make my nose your opinion of European. No thanks #uninstalled pic.twitter.com/DM6fMgUhr5 — Terrance AB Johnson (@tweeterrance) April 19, 2017
Yaroslav Goncharov, the CEO of FaceApp, insisted the feature wasn’t offensive in a statement to Cosmopolitan.com:
The ethnicity change filters have been designed to be equal in all aspects. They don’t have any positive or negative connotations associated with them. They are even represented by the same icon. In addition to that, the list of those filters is shuffled for every photo, so each user sees them in a different order.
The company elaborated to BuzzFeed: “The 'Spark' filter was quite a different case. It implied a positive transformation and therefore, it was unacceptable for an algorithm to implicitly change the ethnicity origin.”
But Gizmodo points out a key factor that led to the offense online: Not too long ago, white people dressed up as other races to poke fun at them — and, specifically, often painted their faces to alter their skin tone and take on stereotypes associated with those races. So while the offense may not have been intentional, it’s been widely interpreted as a digital form of an offensive practice — which is why this, in general, was a pretty bad move.
Update 8/9, 5:15 p.m.: In a statement to Cosmopolitan.com, FaceApp's CEO Yaroslav Goncharov confirms the filters "will be removed in the next few hours."