In what is perhaps the most overreported story of the summer, Snapchat has been taking heat for millennials’ favorite subject: racism.
Snapchat recently released a filter that fuming social justice warriors on Twitter were quick to deem “yellowface.” The filter contorted the faces of users to appear like they have squinty eyes and large teeth.
Considering the company got blasted for "blackface" over its Bob Marley filter this past April, the company might've realized this wasn't a good idea.
In response to the pushback, Snapchat stated that the filter was anime-inspired and “meant to be playful.” But it was too late.
The social justice sharks had already smelled the blood and they would not be deterred from a good race-baiting shame-fest. Could this highly trivial matter have an easy, non-racist explanation? Never. Well, at least not when the media got involved. The initial “controversy” was pretty small, and probably would have remained so. But the media noticed the story.
Many news outlets eagerly jumped on the bandwagon suspiciously soon after the story broke. BuzzFeed, NBC, BBC, and countless others published articles on the topic.
But if you look at the articles, they all include variations of the same few tweets. You will find one of these images on any given news source:
This tweet was on Business Insider:
This one is was also on the Telegraph:
None of the cited tweets even went viral. That hardly constitutes an "outcry."
In fact, if you search Twitter, the vast majority of content related to the “yellowface” filter are news outlets and people reacting to the story. There are very few original tweets expressing outrage.
It would seem that there are very few people who actually noticed this supposed outrage and were triggered enough to take to Twitter. Most people would never have seen it had the media not scooped up the story.
But those in the media saw it. And that's when the witch-hunt really began.