Did Facebook Just Get Hacked?
What's going on with Facebook? Users who have (Latin American) Spanish as their default language on Facebook are being greeted with foul language and mysterious messages like "inci minakor" and "inci siker." Did Facebook get hacked? (Update: Kind of!)
We received an email from a tipster who let us know that some odd stuff was going on with her newsfeed. She uses Spanish as her default language, and instead of "ya no me gusta" ("unlike"), the feed read "inci mınakor." By the time she was able to get a screenshot, the "ya no me gusta" link had been changed back. But "[name] ha comentado la foto" ("[name] has commented on a photo") now reads "[name] ha follando la foto"—"[name] has fucked a photo":
(Note that it also says "con inci" at the end.)
To verify her account, I switched my language over to Spanish (again, Latin American), and found similar changes. In one case, "[name] commented on [name's] photo" became "[name] inci siker [name] inci sikerr":
In another, the name of a YouTube video a few friends were sharing—"Cool dog mowing lawn"—turned into "inci is here":
It's not just us, either: A group called "Yo tb vi como hackearon facebook con el 'fuck you bitches'" ("I saw how you hacked Facebook with the..." well, you get the rest) has more than 2,000 participants so far, plus more screenshots, including the one at the top of this page. (Obviously, I can't account for the veracity of these):
So who, or what, is "inci"? Well, it's a Turkish name (it also means "pearl"). But a few comments on the Facebook group, as well as other places around the web—see for example this Google-translated page here—claim that "inci" or "incidence" is an "anarchist movement" in Turkey. ("Mınakor" and "siker," apparently, both mean "fucks" or "fucker.") The Turkish text in this screenshot, posted to the Facebook group, means "I present to you pearly," according to Google Translate:
Update: Our tipster writes back to point out that the hack extends to Facebook's "like" functionality on external pages, including our own:
Update 2: Looks like this isn't the first time "inci" has messed with Facebook: According to this account on Fudzilla, Inci Sözlük is a Turkish site "famous for the rude antics of its members" (the Turkish /b/?) who pulled the same trick on Facebook earlier this year. It's not quite a hack: Essentially, if enough people flag certain Facebook terms in a given language as incorrect and suggest a different—rude—phrase, Facebook will automatically change it. Hmm—not the first time Facebook's had trouble with foreign languages and automation, is it?