TikTok has stopped allowing people to search for videos featuring the use of an artificial intelligence “chubby filter” after users criticized it as a form of body shaming.
Participants in the trend used an AI-driven tool, created by a user on the editing app CapCut, to alter themselves to look larger. CapCut and TikTok are both owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.
Using Doechii’s song “Anxiety” as the background music, participants in the trend would show unaltered versions of themselves before they applied the filter that transformed them into bigger bodies. Some of the videos have gotten millions of views. While some commenters said they found the trend funny, others said it perpetuates fatphobia and stigmatizes weight gain.
“There’s an amaaazing new trend on TikTok where skinny girls use a filter to become ‘chubby’ and laugh laugh at the results and everyone else laughs and it’s sooooooo funny and we definitely aren’t spiralling back down to pro ana death to fats era that damages every young woman,” an X user wrote in a post that got more than 2.9 million views.
A spokesperson for TikTok confirmed Tuesday that CapCut had removed the filter. The platform is reviewing videos that have used the filter to make them ineligible for recommendation.
In its Community Guidelines, TikTok says it does “not allow showing or promoting disordered eating and dangerous weight loss behaviors, or facilitating the trade or marketing of weight loss or muscle gain products.”
The outcry over the “chubby filter” coincides with greater concerns from people online that society has moved away from body positivity, a movement centered on self-acceptance regardless of body type.
Over the years, other weight-loss-related TikTok trends — including one in which people posted pretend “before and after” weight loss photos and another in which people used the “bloated” filter — have generated similar negative responses. Other filters that…
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