I’m Deleting Snapchat, and You Should Too

Keep your whitewashed filters

This story is part of the Internet Time Machine, a collection about life online in the 2010s.

Snapchat is a prime example of what happens when you don’t have enough people of color building a product.

Yesterday, in the Audacity of Whiteness: Snapchat released a blatantly racist yellowface filter, which excessively slants your eyes, rounds your cheeks, and adds buckteeth for good measure. The company maintains this filter is “anime-inspired.”

Buuuullshit. Anime characters are known for their angled faces, spiky and colorful hair, large eyes, and vivid facial expressions.

This is quite literally yellowface, a derogatory and offensive caricature of Asians.

Chin-Kee, a character illustrating this stereotype from Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese.

Snapchat faced a similar controversy less than four months ago, when they thought it was a good idea to create a Bob Marley filter on 420, which gave users dreadlocks and digital blackface.

Even filters that aren’t as overtly offensive subtly reinforce white superiority and reveal a lack of diversity among the product’s creators. Many of the lenses (flower crown, butterfly crown) whitewash users’ skin and lighten their eye color.

All of these examples, while baffling, do not come as a particular surprise. Snapchat’s CEO, Evan Spiegel, spoke on the company’s diversity in an interview with Recode last summer:

Mossberg: Can you describe your diverse group of people? I mean, what are some of the percentages, if you have them? Spiegel: Again, this is sort of the challenge, and I should have exact percentages for you but we just don’t think about diversity in terms of numbers that way. And I think that one of the perks of being a really small company is, from the beginning, we got to think about diversity, so we didn’t end up with a situation where, 10 years down the line, “Oh my gosh, I need to fix my numbers.” Because it’s not really cool to think of people as numbers. We think about people and diverse skill sets. We’re 300 people now; we were 30 people a year and a half ago. We’ve been really mindful that, as we grow, we need to hire diverse folks, and so I’m sure we’ll have specific numbers to share at some point, but it’s been a part of our growth.

Cool.