Why Can’t Snapchat Solve Its Racism Problem?

Snapchat has gone through a bad 24 hours. The popular image-sharing app debuted a new filter, “anime,” that was swiftly criticized for its racist depiction of East Asians and just as swiftly got pulled. The company is trying to contain the fallout, but lost amid the outrage is the fact that this isn’t an isolated incident. Snapchat has, intentionally or not, a racism problem.

The “anime” filter can be layered over the user’s eyes with closed lids and distorted their faces with the goal of looking more like anime characters. It looks about as bad as it sounds, and users went after Snapchat once they got a look at it. The filter alone is more or less a public-relations nightmare, as Snapchat got raked over the coals:

And nor is this filter just a ghost from the company’s early days or a misguided gaffe. Back in April, the company rolled out a “Bob Marley” filter on April 20. The filter layered Marley’s face over the user and people quickly pointed to the filter as a form of “digital blackface.” If that weren’t enough, in May the company dealt with accusations that its “beautification” filters lightened skin and reduced prominent features.

Granted, Snapchat is more often in the news for accidentally outing racists, and racism across the tech sector is sadly not a new phenomenon, but this marks the third problem the company has had in as many months. Why can’t Snapchat solve this problem?

We can only guess, but some clues are to be had in an interview Snapchat’s CEO Evan Spiegel gave to Walter Mossberg. When Mossberg brought up the issue of diversity at Snapchat, Spiegel tried to set aside the issue before ultimately offering this:

…I should have exact percentages for you but we just don’t think about diversity in terms of numbers that way… Because it’s not really cool to think of people as numbers. We think about people and diverse skill sets. We’ve been really mindful that, as we grow, we need to hire diverse folks, and so I’m sure we’ll have specific numbers to share at some point, but it’s been a part of our growth.

While Snapchat has yet to offer any hard numbers, you can look at the company’s top executives and see the possible problem for yourself. One of the reasons a diverse workplace is so important is that it offers different perspectives, and without that perspective, you let things like “Bob Marley filters” through. Snapchat clearly needs to do more when dealing with matters of race, or sooner or later the company will have a problem that deleting a filter and apologizing won’t take care of.