‘Wrong on so many levels’: Internet reacts to ‘digital blackface’ app

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FaceApp is under fire after releasing a new filter that changes the ethnicity of your photos.

The options under the filter are: white, black, Asian, and Indian.

While the app itself has been popular for giving users the ability to play with the age and gender of their photos, this new filter has many people crying foul, pointing out that this could is essentially digital blackface.

— Teen Vogue: White people using Black GIFs is ‘digital blackface’ — 

However, Yaroslav Goncharov, the app’s CEO and creator, seems to think that the backlash is entirely misplaced, arguing that the app isn’t saying that one race is better or worse than the other and noting that even the icons are all alike for its filter.

“The ethnicity change filters have been designed to be equal in all aspects,” he explained. “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.”

But that isn’t stopping the internet from letting FaceApp have it, clamoring for the filter to be taken off of the app and charging the company with blatant racism for putting it out in the first place.

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