Filter

The context of social media filters is a digital overlay, effect, or tool used to change the look of photos, videos, or even live content before sharing or posting them to various platforms. Filters can be as basic as adjusting brightness, contrast, or colors; they can also be as fancy and artistic as adding a vintage effect or black-and-white aesthetic to content, or beyond that, to making playful add-ons that are cartoonish, or that use augmented reality (AR)-way virtual props, makeup, or facial distortions to visually enhance our looks and identity. Social media filters are pre-designed effects that platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and Facebook give their users to drop onto their content.

These image-altering filters are, in a word, fun. They are enjoyed by not just kids and teenagers, but also by an increasing number of adults. Filters, and the content they help make, are a part of the decent, quotidian fun many of us seek and find across the not-so-venomous world of social media platforms.

Content and interaction that feature filters allow us to visually express ourselves, to create moments of visual storytelling that are (x) visually dynamic, (y) funny, or (z) personally significant. Filters also serve as the visual markers of trends and memes across the social media platforms they help us sausage-link, or 'connect the dots, visually, from one content item to another. ' Content with filters that look like something seen in a meme or that 'seems to be trending' is intoxicated with the possibility of going viral.