Engineering Ethics in Social Media Beauty Filters

The exponentially increasing popularity of social media has ingrained it into almost everyone’s lives, especially younger generations who have grown up posting on Instagram, sending photos on Snapchat, and making videos on TikTok. Each app comes with its niche as an online platform, yet they all share one thing: beauty filters. These beauty filters, when applied to one’s image, can alter the appearance of one’s bone structure and coloration. While initially created as a playful and innocent feature, these filters have been unveiled as perpetuating Eurocentric beauty standards, which violates the Engineering Code of Ethics that obligates engineers to strive to serve the public interest.

Users exposed this bias within media platforms when they began to notice that the beauty filters did not “work” on certain groups of people. These filters enhanced only European features by white-washing skin and warping and distorting the perception of its users’ faces while reinforcing the idea of what people are “supposed” to look like. The popularity of TikTok’s “Glow Look” filter, for example, has bolstered the damage of these filters on society, especially younger generations prevalent on the app. For younger girls belonging to minority groups, this perpetuation of an unattainable beauty standard is disturbing and detrimental to mental health. A person of color might see these facial features as the standard of being beautiful and desirable whenever they go online, which exacerbates a racial disparity where white people are considered the standard. A parallel phenomenon also occurred when Snapchat introduced its first filters, resulting in what is now referred to as “Snapchat Dysmorphia,” in which patients would seek cosmetic surgery to resemble how they viewed themselves in Snapchat filters.

Social media platforms have been sustaining unattainable and often racially biased beauty standards for years. From an ethics perspective, the engineers behind developing these media filters are held to a set of professional obligations. Chief among them is the obligation to serve the public interest. The negative impact of these filters supports that the engineers at these companies are not genuinely serving their constituents or customers. However, when confronted, Tiktok did not explicitly claim responsibility for the impacts of their filters. A facet of an engineer’s ethical obligations is to acknowledge errors and promise not to distort or alter the facts, and the lack of accountability within online companies clearly violates this ethical expectation. The engineers within these companies should be pushing to take responsibility for the impacts of the software they release and, in turn, take tangible steps to better their work.

Tiktok has revealed its process for creating these beauty filters. They use a technology called deep learning, where a computer is equipped to identify facial features from images of real faces. With this “beauty algorithm,” it becomes Tiktok’s duty to guarantee that the system is trained on a diverse set of faces. Recently Tiktok released a new filter, the “Belle” filter, that enhances a South Korean beauty standard. Some white users complained that the filter made them look unattractive, whereas East Asian users recognized and appreciated that the filter catered more specifically to their features. For the engineers at these companies to uphold their promise in the Code of Ethics to treat all persons with dignity, respect, fairness, and without discrimination, they must take bold strides in the direction of inclusivity, similar to the “Belle” filter. This could mean many things in practice, the most probable being to release multiple filters that would respect and belong to different groups. This way, there is no singular beauty standard, but many different aspects of different cultures that can be celebrated. Exposure to a diverse set of faces will dilute the Eurocentric beauty standards prevalent in our society. This would benefit the public and stay true to the Engineering Code of Ethics.

References

[1] Nguyen, J. (2021, August 6). Tiktok beauty filters can be super realistic-unless you’re a person of color. Mashable India. Retrieved from https://in.mashable.com/tech/24013/tiktok-beauty-filters-can-be-super-realistic-unless-youre-a-person-of-color