İnci Sözlük, also spelt ''İncisözlük,'' is a Turkish-language

Internet forum An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporar ...

. Founded by Serkan İnci and İsmail Alpen in December 2009, the site hosts boards dedicated to a wide variety of topics, from

sports Sport pertains to any form of competitive physical activity or game that aims to use, maintain, or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants and, in some cases, entertainment to spectators. Sports can, ...

, games, cooking,

television Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertisin ...

politics Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that stud ...

and

religion Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatural, ...

, among others. Registered users submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images, and videos. Submissions with more upvotes appear towards site's front page. The website is often compared to

4chan 4chan is an anonymous English-language imageboard website. Launched by Christopher "moot" Poole in October 2003, the site hosts boards dedicated to a wide variety of topics, from anime and manga to video games, cooking, weapons, television, ...

and regarded as the Turkish equivalent of it. As of February 22, 2023, the website has over 1 million users.

History

On the official webpage of the community there are "stars" for famous pranks that they organized. They were the first to announce an anomaly in

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

's code on May 10, 2010. Unscrupulous users were able to exploit this bug to add unconfirmed users to members' "following" list. The community also abused the translation function of

facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...

by mass-voting for dirty and suggestive translations. The community is also widely Blamed for the hoax regarding Atilla Taş, a Turkish pop singer who they started labelling as

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

named "Athillas Thasos" after the release of his Gangnam Style parody "Yam Yam Style", which was widely criticised in Turkey, in order to put the blame on Greeks. In April 2011,

Adnan Oktar Adnan Oktar (; born 2 February 1956), also known as Adnan Hoca or Harun Yahya, is a Turkish religious sex cult leader, creationist/ anti-evolutionist, conspiracy theorist, preacher and pamphleteer.Filiu, ''Apocalypse in Islam'', 2011: p.171 I ...

took the website to court after he was confronted with what he considered to be defamation about him on the website.

References

Turkish social networking websites {{socialnetwork-stub