Photo-sharing platform Snapchat on April Fools’ Day trolled Facebook by introducing a filter that makes it appear as if a Russian bot has liked your post. The filter places a Facebook user interface around a user’s photo with Cyrillic script-like text and even includes likes from “your mum” and “a bot”, The Verge reported late on Sunday. Snapchat’s filter was only available on April Fools’ Day. The filter targeted Facebook following reports that said more than 50,000 bots on Facebook, with links to the Russian government, were used to influence the 2016 US presidential election. Last year, Snapchat trolled Facebook with a filter that gets like from “my_mom” showing Facebook’s older-skewing user base.
Facebook has been facing intense criticism after it emerged that data of about 50 million users had been harvested and passed on to political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica. The London-based political research organisation, which collaborated with the election campaign of Donald Trump in the run up to the 2016 US vote, used the leaked information to develop a computer programme to predict the decisions of US voters and influence them.
