The Repeated Racism of Snapchat

One approach to this problem might be: Do no harm.

But that is a test that Snapchat, the makers of the extremely successful messaging app of the same name, have repeatedly failed to meet.

One of Snapchat’s more unusual features is its set of face-morphing filters. They’re essentially algorithmic funhouse mirrors: You can swipe different ways of contorting faces seen through your phone camera so that they have an enormous mouth, or a gold medal around their neck, or that make someone look like a comical pirate. In just the past six months, Snapchat has blundered (twice!) into releasing filters that it’s hard not to read as extremely racist.

This week, for instance, it debuted a filter that covered over a user’s eyes and forehead with closed-eye slants while enlarging their teeth and reddening their cheeks. The company called the feature “anime-inspired.”

A tweet from @tequilafunrise: “wanna tell me why u thought this yellowface was ok??” Two images attached to the tweet depict a woman using the filter and clip art of a yellowface caricature.

But as highlighted by Katie Zhu, a product manager at Medium, that set of visual clues has few roots in anime. “Anime characters are known for their angled faces, spiky and colorful hair, large eyes, and vivid facial expressions,” she wrote. Instead, the filter adopts wholesale a different visual language of representing East Asians: yellowface. Indeed, two hallmarks of yellowface are squinted eyes and buckteeth.

In a statement to press, Snapchat could not quite bring itself to a mea culpa.

“This anime-inspired lens has already expired and won’t be put back into circulation,” it said. “Lenses are meant to be playful and never to offend.”

Earlier this year, on April 20, Snapchat released a “Bob Marley” filter. The digital mask edited a knit cap and dreadlocks on users, while also darkening their skin. That this was a kind of digital blackface—another taboo racist caricature with a long history in the United States—was evidently lost to Snapchat, an American company.

The company withdrew the filter and said it launched the software in partnership with the Bob Marley Estate.

Yellowface and blackface are not shrouded and arcane aspects of the American racial experience, marginalia known only to historians and theorists. Unlike AirBNB’s struggles with discrimination, for instance, they are neither disaggregated across users nor difficult to untangle from America’s structural racial inequality. Blackface and yellowface—especially in the simplistic form perpetrated by Snapchat—are plain and easy taboos, and for good reason. Even if Snapchat’s main audience are college kids, there are articles every October aimed at college kids documenting the perils of blackface and yellowface.

In other words: Not making a yellowface filter is like playing Don’t Be a Racist Company on the beginner setting.

Article Appeared @http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/snapchat-makes-another-racist-misstep/495701/