Last June, researchers quantitatively proved the racist, misogynistic and appalling practices by TikTok. Comparing TikTok’s different metrics of the popular beauty filter, Bold Glamour, and cross-referencing the results with the social media company’s own “inclusivity policies”.
Allegations of TikTok’s racist practices on the platform have been reported in the past, and former employees of TikTok even filed a legal complaint against the company for the racial discrimination they faced while working there. Now, Miriam Doh, Corinna Canali, and Nuria Oliver provided further prove of how racist this platform is, and how it does not care about inclusivity at all.
Bold Glamour and similar filters all leverage computer vision algorithms to apply beauty effects to a user’s face. Users on the platform might apply this for fun, but especially younger users also use it due to insecurities. Applying a filter typically includes predefined beauty standards, such as smoothing the skin and modifying the lips, nose, eyes and cheeks to conform to society’s problematic ideal of attractiveness. The study investigated three questions: 1) Does the filter brighten the face? 2) Do transformations depend on gender and race?, and 3) if any, what type of facial feature alignment is applied? The result? The filter infers gender, adjusting facial features according to gender norms (adding makeup-like effects to female faces and structural changes to male faces), as well as race (brightening Black and Latina faces, especially when female), while aligning traits of female features with those of Black women. This further illustrates the distorted notion that Black features are only ideal on light/white skin…
The researchers conclude that this type of technology blurs the boundary between our real-life and digital self-representation, basically simulating our identity. What definitely bears mentioning is that ‘social’ media platforms purposefully enable these features to be used, subliminally influencing (not pun intended) the racist and misogynistic norms of our society, all while serving these companies’ capitalistic and exploitative interests. All the results found are in direct violation of TikTok’s own(!!!) inclusivity policy.
See: What TikTok Claims, What Bold Glamour Does: A Filter’s Paradox at ACM FAccT 2025, or download the PDF of the paper.