Conall Lynch
I’m sure we all remember the instagram/snapchat filters that would have the prompt “what disney princess are you?”, “what mood are you in?”, or “where are you going to be in 25 years?”. Then you would hold the camera up to your face and, almost like a roulette machine, it would cycle through all the answers quickly before coming to the logical conclusion of knowing what the answer is. I am explaining how they work… because they dont fucking work, its all random. It’s like we are back in middle school playing with a magic 8 ball trying to see if Sarah actually likes me, or if I will get an Xbox for christmas. This is the social media version of that shit, but instead of doing it with one or two of your friends during recess, you can do it to 100,000 people across the world and let them all know that you suck.
First of all, I want to let anyone reading this know that… I know this is just some stupid instagram filter that doesnt actually mean what its saying, so why am I so angry about it? I don’t know maybe read this then tell me your thoughts as to why i’m so angry, but in the meantime, fuck this shit. The people who are using these filters are not kids. Because I am not friends with any kids on instagram, so you have 20-something year olds posting what Disney princess they look like according to an app on their stories. Now it’s one thing to do this by yourself or with your friends and be curious as to what princess instagram thinks you look like, but to then post that video Is a whole new level of douche. What are you gaining from that other than wanting all your followers to know that an app thinks you’re as hot as a princess.
Another issue I have with these filters is that they seem racist. I will see a video of a white girl doing the disney princess filter and get Mulan. Now obviously all this shit is random, but the girl will then zoom in on her face and make a sort of disgusted look. As if because Mulan is not her same skin color, the filter is messed up and she is mad. That’s fucked up. I will also see comments from her followers like “OMG hahaha they got it so wrong lol”. Isn’t that racist of them? Also wouldn’t a person of darker skin color getting matched with a darker skinned princess also be racist? Because the app has to decide what skin color the person is in order to accurately match them with the correct princess right? So who is that programmer over at Instagram that was forced to basically make a “skin color filter” but then was like I’ll just call it the Disney princess filter. That’s fucked up.
The next filter that I see a lot of is the “what mood are you in” filter. This one works by holding the camera up to your face as it cycles through all the different moods that you apparently could be in until it tells you the answer. Why do you need an app for this? Can’t u just take half a second and send whatever signal it is to your brian asking “hey… we good?” I don’t know about you, but I don’t have to physically do something to check how i’m feeling. But I also don’t need a fucking app to tell me either. And you know how I mentioned previously some of these videos of people using these filters would sometimes end with them not liking the answer and zooming in on their face… because that’s comedy. Well, this filter has a much higher percentage of that because it’s no longer using the physical appearance of skin color (which it never should have been and I am 100% against it) it now is using something more personal and harder to guess… emotion. So now like 50% of these videos are just of some white girl using the filter looking all happy until the filter says she horny, so she zooms into her face making a smirk and that’s it. There are hundreds of comments below this video with just “OMG HORNY LOL” or “Wow someone needs to get laid out there lol”. Why do these people exist?
I understand that these are just stupid instagram filters that are random and don’t matter. My argument is that these “influencers” make them seem real in order to seem relevant or, dare I say it, funny. The filters are obviously harmless, besides the one that literally guesses your skin color so it can match you with something of the same color… we have to watch out for that one.
