Bob Marley filter

Snapchat...

A screenshot of some of the Marley face swaps people are sharing on Twitter. Photo: Twitter

Snapchat's Bob Marley filter hits the wrong notes

Is this love? Really? Fans say the filter, which applies a darker skin tone and dreadlocks, disrespects the reggae icon's legacy and is little more than 'digital blackface'.

Snapchat has launched an arguably racist Bob Marley filter that's making lots of people on the internet mad. In a nutshell, the feature lets you wear Marley's face like some kind of weird Rastafarian mask.

The incredible thing isn't that such a filter exists — virtually every face-swap app has one. It's that users are suddenly, unprecedentedly, concerned about its racial implications.

This is an incomplete census, but among the other apps that essentially do the same things that Snapchat's Marley feature does: the wildly popular Face Swap Live, which lists Beyonce and President Barack Obama among its top swap-able faces; Facebook-owned MSQRD, which includes a dreadlocked Rastafarian among its options; Face Swap Booth, whose rotating selection of celebrity faces includes Nicki Minaj; and Yahoo's Face Stealer, which literally encourages users to appropriate the faces of whomever they wish. (You can actually search a database of photos for more "masks," and only the most overt of slurs are blocked from it. "Blackface" is not blocked, for instance.)

  AP