Snapchat is leaning into its bitter rivalry with Facebook this April Fool’s Day, unveiling a photo filter that pokes Facebook in the eye for its inability to curtail the Russian influence campaign on its site.
Snapchat is mocking Facebook and its Russian political ads controversy with a new April Fool’s Day filter
Nothing is off-limits in the fight between the two social media companies.
A new filter allows you to pretend you are uploading a new profile photo to Facebook — but the standard News Feed language that someone “updated their profile picture” instead reads in Cyrillic. The people who like the photo are, “Your Mom, a bot, and 2 others” — with all that language being featured in Cyrillic-looking text.
Here’s our friend Casey Newton of our sister site The Verge showing off the feature.
It’s a pretty aggressive prank by Snapchat — which has largely evaded the election-related Russia controversies that have ensnared Silicon Valley giants like Facebook, Twitter, Google and Reddit. But Snapchat hasn’t shied away from hand-to-hand combat with the social media giant that owns Instagram. Instagram copied Snapchat’s Stories feature, and its rise as a competitor to Snapchat is at least partly responsible for Snap’s business problems and lackluster performance on Wall Street.
Last April Fool’s Day, Snapchat nodded to that beef with a filter that allowed someone to take a photo and apply a filter that was literally the Instagram interface. Well played.
But this year’s prank hits at a much more sensitive note — Facebook is in crisis, and Snapchat is pointing and laughing.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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