Associated Incidents
FaceApp has removed a number of racially themed photo filters after being accused of racism.
The app, which uses artificial intelligence to edit pictures, this week launched a number of “ethnicity change filters”.
They claimed to show users what they'd look like if they were Caucasian, Black, Asian or Indian.
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FaceApp has attracted fierce criticism for launching the filters, with some users claiming they were racist, and encouraged users to "black up" digitally.
Responding to the backlash, FaceApp founder and CEO, Yaroslav Goncharov, said, “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 filters have, however, now been removed from the app.
Mr Goncharov declined to comment when the Independent asked why FaceApp decided to remove the filters.
Shape Created with Sketch. 11 useful Facebook features you didn't know existed Show all 11 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. 11 useful Facebook features you didn't know existed 1/11 Clean up your News Feed Most of us are Facebook friends with some people we don’t actually care about, and there are several ways to keep their updates off your News Feed. The easiest option is to head to the column on the left and open News Feed Preferences. From here, you can prioritise friends, unfollow friends, refollow friends you unfollowed in the past and even block specific apps. 2/11 Change ad preferences You can view a list of everything Facebook thinks you’re into and tinker with your ad preferences. A lot more information is displayed on the desktop site than the app, so we’d recommend doing this on a computer. Just open Settings and select Advert Preferences. 3/11 Manage notifications You can get notifications about pretty much anything on Facebook these days, and that can be seriously irritating. Choose what you do and don’t want to be notified about by going into the Settings menu and selecting Notifications. You might be surprised by the number of sections you have to trawl through. 4/11 Save data Facebook automatically plays videos in your News Feed, and that’s a problem if you aren’t on a generous data plan. You can change this by going to Videos in the Settings menu and disabling autoplay. On the app, there’s feature in the left-hand column called Data Saver, which also does this, but reduces the size of pictures too. 5/11 Reorder your News feed You can choose to order the updates that appear in your News Feed by time or importance. Just hit the three buttons next to News Feed Preferences on the Facebook site and choose between Top Stories and Recent Stories. 6/11 Download your data Facebook lets you download all of the immense amounts of data it has on you, including the posts you’ve shared, your messages and photos, ads you’ve clicked on and even the IP addresses that are logged when you log in or out of the site. It’s a lot of information, which you’ll want to get your hands on if you decide to quit the social network. 7/11 Find nearby places Nearby Places is actually a really handy tool, which lets you quickly find and research things like restaurants, hotels, museums and nightlife hotspots around you. It lives in the left-hand column, and also shows useful information like customer ratings, prices and distance. 8/11 Find free Wi-Fi Similarly, Find Wi-Fi is ideal for when you’re bored, running low on data or lost. It shows you all the places in your vicinity that offer free Wi-Fi, so you can head over and either relax or get some work done. 9/11 Save things for later Facebook’s ideal for killing time, but every now and again you’ll stumble across something you’re interested in right as you need to put your phone away. Fortunately, you can save posts for later by hitting the arrow in the top-right corner and selecting the Save option. Everything you save goes straight to the Saved section in the left-hand column. 10/11 Control tags When people tag you in posts or pictures, they don’t have to automatically appear on your profile. You can switch on Facebook’s Review Tags feature by going to Settings and Timeline and Tagging. 11/11 Delete your account To permanently delete your Facebook account, you need to head to Facebook’s Delete Account page. The site can take up to 90 days to process account deletion requests, but once your account's gone, it’s gone. You can deactivate your account instead, by going to Security and Login in the Settings menu. 1/11 Clean up your News Feed Most of us are Facebook friends with some people we don’t actually care about, and there are several ways to keep their updates off your News Feed. The easi