#beauty_filters

TikTok changed the shape of some people’s faces without asking | MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/10/1026074/tiktok-mandatory-beauty-filter-bug/?truid=a497ecb44646822921c70e7e051f7f1a

https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/AP_21023639270393.jpg?resize=1200,600

Users noticed what appeared to be a beauty filter they hadn’t requested—and which they couldn’t turn off.
by

Abby Ohlheiser
June 10, 2021
An user opening TikTok on his iPhone
Lorenzo Di Cola/NurPhoto via AP

“That’s not my face,” Tori Dawn thought, after opening TikTok to make a video in late May. The jaw reflected back on the screen was wrong, slimmer and more feminine. And when they waved their hand in front of the camera, blocking most of their face from the lens, their jaw appeared to pop back to normal. Was their skin also a little softer?

On further investigation, it seemed as if the image was being run through a beauty filter in the TikTok app. Normally, Dawn keeps those filters off in livestreams and videos to around 320,000 followers. But as they flipped around the app’s settings, there was no way to disable the effect:. it seemed to be permanently in place, subtly feminizing Dawn’s features.
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“My face is pretty androgynous and I like my jawline,” Dawn said in an interview. “So when I saw that it was popping in and out, I’m like ‘why would they do that, why?’ This is one of the only things that I like about my face. Why would you do that?”

Beauty filters are now a part of life online, allowing users to opt in to changing the face they present to the world on social media. Filters can widen eyes, plump up lips, apply makeup, and change the shape of the face, among other things. But it’s usually a choice, not forced on users—which is why Dawn and others who encountered this strange effect, were so angry and disturbed by it.

Dawn told her followers about it in a video. “As long as that’s still a thing,” Dawn said, showing the effect to their jaw pop in and out on screen, “I don’t feel comfortable making videos because this is not what I look like, and I don’t know how to fix it.” The video got more than 300,000 views, they said, and was shared and duetted by other users who noticed the same thing.

congrats tiktok I am super uncomfortable and disphoric now cuz of whatever the fuck this shit is
♬ original sound - Tori Dawn

“Is that why I’ve been kind of looking like an alien lately?” said one.

“Tiktok. Fix this,” said another.

Videos like these circulated for days in late May, as a portion of TikTok’s users looked into the camera and saw a face that wasn’t their own. As the videos spread, many users wondered whether the company was secretly testing out a beauty filter on some users.
An odd, temporary issue

I’m a TikTok lurker, not a maker, so it was only after seeing Dawn’s video that I decided to see if the effect appeared on my own camera. Once I started making a video, the change to my jaw shape was obvious. I suspected, but couldn’t tell for sure, that my skin had been smoothed as well. I sent a video of it in action to coworkers and my Twitter followers, asking them to open the app and try the same thing on their own phones: from their responses, I learned that the effect only seemed to impact Android phones. I reached out to TikTok, and the effect stopped appearing two days later. The company later acknowledged in a short statement that there was an issue that had been resolved, but did not provide further details.
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On the surface it was an odd, temporary issue that affected some users and not others. But it was also forcibly changing people’s appearances—an important glitch for an app that is used by around 100 million people in the US. So I also sent the video to Amy Niu, a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin who studies the psychological impact of beauty filters. She pointed out that in China, and some other places, some apps add a subtle beauty filter by default. When Niu uses apps like WeChat, she can only really tell that a filter is in place by comparing a photo of herself using her camera to the image produced in the app.

A couple months ago, she said, she downloaded the Chinese version of TikTok, called Douyin. “When I turned off the beauty mode and filters, I can still see an adjustment to my face,” she said.

Having beauty filters in an app isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Niu said, but app designers have a responsibility to consider how those filters will be used, and how they will change the people who use them. Even if it was a temporary bug, it could have an impact on how people see themselves.

“People’s internalization of beauty standards, their own body image or whether they will intensify their appearance concerns,” Niu said, are all considerations.

For Dawn, the strange facial effect was just one more thing to add to the list of frustrations with TikTok: “It’s been very reminiscent of a relationship with a narcissist because they love bomb you one minute, they’re giving you all these followers and all this attention and it feels so good,” they said. “And then for some reason they just, they’re just like, we’re cutting you off.”

#Beauty_filters #Image_de_soi #Filtres #Image

Research looks at how Snapchat filters affect self-image - School of Education
▻https://education.wisc.edu/news/research-looks-at-how-snapchat-filters-affect-self-image

While observing heavy use of selfie apps such as Snapchat, UW–Madison graduate student Amy Niu found herself wondering about the effects that virtual makeovers have on college-age females.

Apps such as Snapchat and others offer users photographic filters that change their look. In China, where Niu is originally from, apps similar to this are used even more heavily than they are in the United States.

Popular apps among Chinese college-age females apply the filter as soon as the user opens the app while popular American apps require the user to select a filter before it is applied. Additionally, many Chinese students have phones that apply the filter directly through the phone’s camera so they are seeing their enhanced self every time they take a selfie. In other words, they are seeing themselves with the filter more often than their unedited face. 

“I started to wonder how looking at a different self will change how people will view themselves,” said Niu, who is in the School of Education’s highly regarded Department of Educational Psychology.

From this wondering, her research was born. Niu set out to conduct a study to find out if selfie-editing filters negatively or positively impact one’s evaluation of self, focusing primarily on Chinese college-age females.

As a graduate student in the human development area of her department, Niu is also working on her dissertation that focuses on college student’s social-emotional adjustment and their use of technology and social media. Because of this, Niu is no stranger to research involving the effects that social media apps have on college students.

Winning the UW Global Health Institute’s 2019 Graduate Student Research Award allowed Niu to begin her study. In order to collect her data, she experimented by asking one group of students to look at themselves with a filter applied and another group to look at themselves through a regular camera without a filter.

“I will then be asking each group questions about their self-evaluation and comparing the results to see whether the self-evaluations for these two groups of students are different,” Niu said.

An important part of the study is how it relates to social comparison theory. This theory says that when comparing yourself to others, people are more likely to compare themselves to someone who is better looking and this will negatively impact our self-evaluation. When comparing yourself to a better-looking self, the effects may be very different.

“When comparing to a better-looking self, you may think ‘that’s a potential me’. By this kind of comparison, you may see the potential of being prettier or you may assimilate that image to your self-image. That assimilation may cause you to think ‘I look pretty good’ or ‘I may look as good as this if I make a little bit of effort on myself,” Niu said.

Because of this, Niu believes that this different kind of comparison, which is the kind at play with selfie apps, may elicit a different response and cause students to lose perspective on what they actually look. This illusion of one’s self-image, she suggests, may cause people to temporarily feel better about themselves but later, when they are exposed to their actual look, their self-image may experience greater disturbance than traditional appearance comparisons.

Though the grant Niu received will only be applied to the data collection in China, she conducted a primary experiment on American students in collaboration with Felix Zhan, a Consumer Science graduate student, as well. At this time, Niu has not completed the study but she has seen some interesting differences between the results from the two country’s samples.

“In the American sample, it seems that their self-evaluation is not really influenced by this exposure to a better-looking self, even though the exposure will slightly increase their willingness to conduct cosmetic surgery. For the Chinese students, those who look at the enhanced images do feel better about themselves than those who look at their actual selves,” Niu said.

The results for the Chinese sample were in line with her initial hypothesis.

When she has completed the study in October, she is interested in finding what reasons for the difference in the results between the two samples may be. One of these reasons, she hypothesizes, may be the education in China about self-image. She hopes that the report she will generate will provide insights on how to promote healthy body image among Chinese young women.

“College females need to know that physical appearance is not everything. It is risky to base one’s self-evaluation on appearance. Though one may think a filtered selfie makes her closer to the societal standard of beauty, the fact is that standard is always hard to meet in reality. The algorithm of the beauty filters will only further reinforce the standard in your mind. When you look at your bare face, you fall short. Hopefully, my findings can help us better understand the influences of this new technology’s impact on young women,” Niu said.

#Beauty_filters #Image_de_soi #Filtres #Image