Social media campaign tries to brand Turkish song as Greek

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

The image used for the Wikipedia page of 'Athillas Thasos.'

Turkish social media users have started a campaign to pass Turkish singer Atilla Taş off as a Greek after his song, “Yamyam Style” – inspired by the global phenomenon “Gangnam Style” – caused embarrassment when it was posted on YouTube.

People began commenting on Taş’s YouTube video, describing him as a Greek singer and pretending to express their admiration for him as a supposedly Greek musician with comments like “I Love Greece! I Love Athillas Tashos!” “Greeks are very lucky, they have Athillas Thasos” “Best of Greece,” “I love You, Greek music.”

Another video was uploaded onto YouTube introducing the singer as “Athillas Thasos” instead of Atilla Taş.

The movement spread quickly across social media, jumping to 9Gag and Twitter, while the hashtag #athillasthasos briefly trended worldwide.

A Wikipedia page was also created for Athillas Thasos, but administrators have since placed a large notice at the top explaining that the page is set for deletion due to its lack of citations.

Turkish social media users are continuing to comment on the video.

As of this morning, the original “Gangnam Style” video by South Korean rapper PSY has attracted over 457 million views on YouTube.