Politicians, take note: If you want to spread your mission far and wide, use a cat filter.
Shaukat Yousafzai, a regional minister in northwest Pakistan, discovered that the hard way on Friday when he did a Facebook Live chat in order to brief voters in his area.
Unbeknownst to him, a staff member added a cat filter on the camera, which made Yousafzai look, well ... adorbs?
Live viewers tried to alert the people doing the press conference, but The Verge reports the stream continued on with the cat filter for several minutes.
However, Yousafzai’s political party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, deleted the video after the conference wrapped.
Still, Agence France-Presse reports that screenshots of the conference quickly spread far beyond the area he represents. Yousafzai’s felined face ― pink cat ears and all ― went global.
The PTI released a statement on Saturday about the incident, which it blamed on human error, according to CNN.
The party insisted that “all necessary actions have been taken to avoid such incident in future” while claiming that its “social media team is deemed to be the pioneers of Social Media in Pakistan.”
Yousafzai seemed less defensive about the incident, but emphasized he wasn’t the only victim.
“I wasn’t the only one ― two officials sitting along me were also hit by the cat filter,” he told AFP.
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