FaceApp Offers Black Face Feature, Forced To Remove It And Apologize By The Media

FaceApp is largely known for its feature of allowing users to make themselves look older or younger on their pictures, or perhaps to even have a different kind of smile. Recently, however, the Russian-made app started rolling out a new feature that allowed users to change their picture’s ethnicity altogether. People could choose from Indian, Black, and Asian. Predictably, the internet did not react kindly, and the creators were forced to remove the feature.

First noticed by Mic, the filters pretty much do exactly what they say. If a Caucasian person submits their photo on the filter, they can choose to turn themselves into any or all of the three ethnic appearances available. In varying degrees of changes, the appearance could either be mild or radical. Of course, this depends a lot on the complexion and the facial structure of the user, to begin with.

In any case, the app’s CEO Yaroslav Goncharov defended the filters by basically saying none of them come with advantages or disadvantages that would disparage one filter while elevating the other. This isn’t the first time that the company was called out for offering racially-tilted filters either.

“The ethnicity change filters have been designed to be equal in all aspects,” 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 shuffled for every photo, so each user sees them in a different order.”

Unfortunately, this was simply not good enough for publishers, with The Verge essentially saying that the filters allow people to do “Black Face”. The publication is hardly alone in criticizing the app either, with many others jumping on the bandwagon where the knee-jerk reaction to any kind of way to change one’s face to that of another ethnicity is considered evil. So, now, the feature is being removed.