TikTok withdraws controversial ‘chubby’ filter

TikTok has withdrawn a controversial photo filter that made users look heavier. Brook Joyner/CNN via CNN Newsource

TikTok has withdrawn a controversial filter that allowed users to alter their photos to make themselves look heavier.

Each AI-filtered video on the app follows the same pattern. It starts with an unedited photo of the user—usually slim—before the “chubby filter” trickles down the screen, altering the subject’s physique, while the song “Anxiety” by American rapper and singer-songwriter Doechii plays.

As more and more of these videos appeared, a backlash built from users concerned about an implicit body-shaming message. People began commenting on them—“this trend is mean girl coded,” wrote one user, whose comment received more than 5,000 likes.

TikToker sadiebass16 said in a video: “Imagine you’re just trying to exist on this app and you see thousands of people using an AI filter to have a body that looks like your body, shaming it and all the comments being like ‘ugh, imagine.’ A lot of people can imagine.”

Luna, a health and wellbeing app for teens, also criticized the filter for promoting “body shaming and unhealthy beauty standards.”

CNN has reached out to TikTok for comment. The company told the BBC it had removed the filter from its app and that it was reviewing videos that featured the filter, making them ineligible for recommendation and blocking them from teen accounts.

TikTok added that the filter was uploaded by a company called CapCut, which is a separate entity but has the same parent company, ByteDance.

A search Monday morning for “chubby filter” brought up no results on the phone app. However, a search on the desktop version still threw up some content.

There are hundreds of filters on TikTok, and many are harmless—for example, adding bunny ears or a dog nose to a face.

However, the app’s beauty filters have been widely criticized as damaging to users’ self-esteem. One such filter smoothes out wrinkles, supposedly returning users to their teenage selves but potentially playing into ageist beauty tropes. The chubby filter, critics say, reinforces the widely perceived connection between beauty and thinness.

A TikToker who posts under the name SaffsStuff took the filter to task in a video that has received more than 100,000 views: “I don’t think it’s funny, I don’t think it’s light-hearted. I think it’s part of this bigger problem of diet culture and heroin chic really becoming a proper, proper trend on social media at the moment.”

One small study from 2019 linked the use of social media filters with higher acceptance of cosmetic surgery, while researchers from Harvard Business Review found in 2021 that people with high confidence in their looks can actually be more unsettled by seeing “improvements” to their face than those who already had insecurities.

TikTok announced last November that children under the age of 18 would no longer have access to beauty filters following a report it commissioned that investigated the impact of these effects on young people.