WATERMARKING AND PHOTO LITERACY
When posting with a filter on Instagram, a watermark that links to the filter and its creator appears on the image.
This watermark is important to assist users in determining whether someone’s appearance is altered or not. Some users get around the watermarking by downloading their filtered photo, and re-uploading it so their filtered appearance is more difficult to detect.
By removing popular beauty filters from Instagram, this “covert” practice will become the default way for users to post with these filters on the platform.
Forcing users into covert filter use adds another thorn to the already prickly case of visual literacy.
Young women and girls feel inadequate compared to edited and filtered images online (including their own).
Some newer TikTok filters, such as the viral “Bold Glamour” filter, use AI technology (AI-AR) which merges the user’s face with the beauty filter, trained on a database of “ideal” images.
By contrast, standard AR filters overlay a set design (akin to a mask) and contort the user’s features to match. The result of these new AI-AR filters is a hyper-realistic, and yet totally unachievable beauty standard.
The removal of beauty filters on Instagram will not stop their use. Instead, it will drive users to other platforms to access filters. Like Bold Glamour, these filters will be more sophisticated and harder to detect when they are re-posted cross platform, without the benefit of having the watermark indicator.
Only 34 per cent of Australian adults feel confident in their media literacy skills. Those with less developed digital visual literacies increasingly find it difficult to ascertain the difference between edited and unedited images. Add to this the rapid increase in generative AI images, and we are entering unprecedented territory.
While the removal of beautifying filters at a more pivotal time may have been meaningful, the genie is out of the bottle. By Instagram removing its already hugely popular beautifying filters now (and the watermarking that goes along with it), the problems associated with filter use on Instagram will not go away, but simply become harder to manage.
Lauren A Miller is a PhD student at Swinburne University of Technology. This commentary first appeared on The Conversation.
