Pranksters have managed to replace popular Facebook system messages in Turkish with offensive language yesterday. The attack leveraged the power of crowdsourcing to vote the automatic approval of rogue changes.

Facebook provides an application called “Translations” for people to translate the thousands of system messages and alerts into their native language. Through a submission voting system the app also allows the community to improve on the existent translations.

Unfortunately, a group of Turkish pranksters realized that if they could get enough votes to back up a proposed translation, the change would be accepted automatically. Therefore, they asked all members of a forum to help poison popular Facebook messages in Turkish with offensive terms for fun.

The vote flooding and translation poisoning went on for a while, until Facebook staff caught on to it and reverted all rogue changes. The translation application was also disabled temporarily for multiple languages. It’s not yet clear if this decision was prompted by similar attacks performed by other groups who wanted to imitate the Turkish pranksters.

See: Softpedia