Twitter banned a user who turned the new Little Mermaid white
In recent days on TikTok the videos of African American girls who react to the first images of the trailer have gone viral: “She is black like me!”.
In the live action produced by Disney on the Mermaid the new Ariel will be played by the African American actress Halle Bailey. The news was known from the days of the first castings but since the release of the first official trailer The accusations of those who were amazed at the choice to change the origins of the protagonist began to rain on social networks. You accusations often seasoned with a good dose of racism. One Twitter user, however, went further. @vandalibm released a clip in which, thanks to an artificial intelligence system, he changed all the features of Halle Bailey, transforming her into an actress with white skin.
His choice was sanctioned by Twitter: the social network in fact decided to ban your account. At the software level, the operation is not trivial. The AI used for this transformation didn’t just edit a photo but an entire clip. Her face then appears in motion, even if the voice with which the actress intones the song taken in the trailer has remained the same. The background of racism from which the idea of sharing this clip started is clear, as @vandalibm explained in the comment to the images that now the Little Mermaid had been “Repaired”.
Not only. In one of the few remaining screenshots of his statements, we read that with his method he could have “repaired” the entire film in 24 hours. Also according to this user, the operation of changing the characteristics would have been carried out thanks to the work of another account: @TenGazillionIQ. According to the bio, this profile (still active) belongs to a PhD who deals with artificial intelligence. After the first controversies raised about the clip, @vandalibm had also tried to justify himself by explaining that the images had been published only for “educational purposes”.
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The reactions of the girls to the trailer: “She’s as black as me!”
A fairly clear answer to all the criticisms of the Little Mermaid trailer had been provided in recent days by a series of videos that went viral on TikTok. The clips captured the reaction of African American girls to the new version of one of the most famous Disney princesses in the entire franchise. With a few variations, the commentary on Ariel’s first images was always the same: “She’s as black as me!”.