Snapchat's April Fool's Day joke is one of the most savage this year. After trolling Facebook last year with an Instagram-style filter — to show Facebook's repeated attempts to turn Instagram into Snapchat by copying many of its features — the photo messaging service has now uploaded a new filter that trolls Facebook once more.
Snapchat's April Fool's Day Joke
This new filter creates a Facebook newsfeed-style filter that's designed to make fun of Russian bot accounts invading Facebook. The filter places a Facebook-style user interface around the photo with text that looks like Cyrillic script, indicating that Russians have liked the post. It even includes likes from "your mum" — indicating Facebook's older user base, which Snapchat also used last year — and "a bot."
Needless to say that the Cyrillic script is a callout to Russia, and more importantly, the fact that over 50,000 bot accounts associated with the Russian government had one point taken to Facebook to instigate all sorts of chaos and malice during the 2016 presidential election.
Unfortunately, Snapchat's Facebook filter will only be live for the duration of April Fool's Day, so if you're reading this, it's probably not available anymore.
Facebook Cambridge Analytica Scandal
Snapchat's savage shade-throwing comes amid Facebook's massive data scandal, in which it was found that data consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had stolen information from 50 million Facebook accounts, and the social network knew about it for a long time.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has done various things to try and salvage the company's reputation, including taking full responsibility for what's happened, running full-page apology ads across major newspapers. He's also scheduled to face U.S. Congress on April 10 to testify about his company's data crisis. CNN reports that he'll be joined by two other chief executives: Google's Sundar Pichai and Twitter's Jack Dorsey.
It's Payback Time
Snapchat clearly took this scandal as the best opportunity to hurt Facebook even further amid its high-stakes company meltdown. To be fair, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has been pretty frustrated about Facebook's many attempts to steal Snapchat's features and ideas, and this probably was his form of payback. Facebook has copied things like face filters, camera features, stories, and many others, from Snapchat. The latest filter is proof that Snap Inc. isn't quite yet done trolling and making fun of its chief rival.
Thoughts about Snapchat's new filter? Do you think Snap Inc. was too savage toward Facebook? As always, if you have any thoughts, feel free to sound them off in the comments section below!
