"Live video continues to be an important way for anyone, including our elected representatives, to share their point of view on important issues and invite everyone to be a part of the conversation," the Periscope team wrote in a recent Medium post. And what better way to share your thoughts and spur reasonable discussion of the issues than to hide behind a virtual mask and shout partisan opinions into your phone?

Still, this is an interesting move on Periscope's part. The company is clearly taking aim at rival Snapchat, which has long enabled users to don digital masks -- the difference of course is that Periscope's overlays are applied directly to a live video feed rather than as a post production treatment for prerecorded video.