Facebook announced yesterday that it is pausing the publication of new augmented reality filters in Spark AR Studio for an as-yet-unspecified period of time. The company's move will certainly frustrate many content creators for FB and Instagram Stories, but it is perfectly understandable.

The reason for the interruption

The reason is the lack of moderation professionals at Facebook and Instagram who normally approve this content, but who were sent home due to the coronavirus pandemic. The official statement was posted on the Spark AR Studio Facebook page, the tool used to create the filters.

By sending these employees home, FB hopes to help contain the COVID-19 pandemic and thus preserve the health of employees and the communities in which they live. 

It is believed that for security reasons, moderation of the filters will not be carried out, so the publication of new creations is interrupted. The filters could continue to be approved from home by these professionals, but this is FB's decision, and it is up to everyone to accept it.

Creators can continue to develop new filters and submit them, but without the approval process, they will not be published. The exact timing of the interruption of the approval process has not yet been announced by Facebook.

For those who want to test their new filters and effects, even without official approval, it is still possible to create a link to show it to your friends and followers, as indicated this post about the submission and approval process on the Spark AR website.

The post states that some of the automatic validation processes will continue to work, so creators can continue to receive some statistics from their filters. Finally, Facebook says that they are looking into ways to resume publishing filters, but they do not say when that would happen.

Any news will be announced on the Spark AR page on the website.

Through which channels you reach those people, classic and out of the box. Phone Arena.