An app that allows people to change their faces pulled its black and Asian filters Wednesday afternoon after facing outrage over racism.
FaceApp, similar to Snapchat, recently rolled out filters that allowed people to change their ethnicity to Caucasian, black, Asian and Indian, reports Mashable. Users weren’t happy with the ethnic filters, feeling that they were racist after trying them out.
“Wow… FaceApp really setting the bar for racist AR with its awful new update that includes Black, Indian and Asian “race filters,” one Twitter user wrote.
The CEO of FaceApp said the filters didn’t have any negative connotations behind them, but added that the app would be removing them.
“The ethnicity change filters have been designed to be equal in all aspects,” Yaroslav Goncharov said. “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 fled for every photo, so each user sees them in a different order.”
FaceApp was also criticized earlier this year for a “hotness” filter aimed at making people look more attractive. People were outraged when the “hotness” filter made people look more white. (RELATED:This App’s ‘Hotness’ Filter Makes Everyone Whiter And People Are Mad)
“We are deeply sorry for this unquestionably serious issue,” Goncharov apologized at the time. He blamed the issue on the “training set bias” of the program and not an intentional move.
“To mitigate the issue, we have renamed the effect to exclude any positive connotation associated with it. We are also working on the complete fix that should arrive soon,” he said.
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