It would seem that the topic is of global importance. Tens of thousands and even millions of TikTokers took part in the silhouette challenge, in which girls and boys shoot themselves in candid poses and then hide everything except the silhouette with the help of a characteristic red-black filter.
The total number of views of videos under the hashtags #silhouette and #silhouettechallenge exceeds a billion - and then it suddenly turns out that the filter is actually not hiding anything! Before the big media sounded the alarm, TikTok user Kai Lee announced this on her account.
"Hello everyone! I am a photographer and I constantly see the silhouette challenge videos in my feed. And while they are all very cute and creative and you are all bombs, be careful with what you wear when shooting. Because anyone can take these frames and return them to their original state. So if you are only wearing underwear or you are completely naked in a video that is being filtered, remember that it is very simple - click! - and return to the original."
There is almost panic on social media and in the press, here are just a few headlines. American Buzzfeed: “Women warn users against participating in the silhouette challenge. Australian TV channel Nine: "TikTok Challenge spawned instructions for creating nude videos: is there a limit to creepiness." Russian Lenta.ru: "The girls were under threat to appear naked in front of web users." It got to the point that Rolling Stone journalist Edge Dixon accused YouTube of distributing instructions for removing the red filter and making money on it.
This is a serious matter, we are starting to check. There are video instructions on YouTube - under the most popular hundreds of thousands of views. True, there is one but - none of these digital stripping video tutorials shows the result itself. More precisely, it shows, but it doesn't seem impressive. The instructor simply takes a black and red video of a girl's silhouette, increases the brightness, decreases the contrast and saturation - and it turns out a black and gray video in which nothing new is visible. Here's what YouTube blogger Hacker0007 says.
“It is impossible to remove the filter from the video. You can only change the saturation, brightness and contrast on your existing filter clip, but the filter will remain. If someone wants to prove otherwise, go for it - send me the video that you got afterwards. Which clearly shows the face and everything else. In fact, only a dark figure will remain, and it will be visible only those parts of the body that were highlighted by the light on the movie with the filter. And in all these instructions, people simply exaggerate and say that everything will be visible in general. This is not true.
As a result, the entire TikTok scandal, which was covered by major media in dozens of countries around the world, turns out to be noise from nothing. Publications that are already used to filtering unconfirmed reports that razors were found in apples and that disinfection will be sprayed from helicopters, the less obvious fake on online topics was simply missed.
