A News Station Just Reported That Video Game Cheat Codes Were Secret Revolutionary Messages

A revolution via button-mashing.

On Monday evening, Turkish News Channel ATV showed journalist Ozlem Atkay rummaging through bins in an attempt to find discarded communication from the people behind Turkey's recent failed coup.

View this video on YouTube

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ATV is a nationwide news channel and known for its pro-government stance.

During the broadcast, she found a notebook. She held the it up to camera and said, "It looks like they have the codes for the coup. It says 'cheats' up top but it also says 'health and guns,' 'health and armor,' 'weather,' 'helicopter,' 'engine and guns,' which were all things being used in the coup, the attempted coup."

However, viewers noticed that these weren't secret revolutionary codes, but instead cheat codes for the video game Grand Theft Auto IV.

Naturally, people started making jokes and just plain laughing at her.

Yurt genelinde OHAL süresince GTA 4 oynamak yasaklandı. GTA 5 ve serinin diğer oyunları da inceleme altında...

"In the nation, during the State of Emergency, playing GTA 4 is banned. GTA 5 and other games in the series are currently under investigation."

ÇOK ACİL! Boş ve klimalı otobüs şifresi olan var mı? GTA 4

"VERY URGENT! Does anyone have cheat codes for empty and AC-ed buses? GTA4"

The jokes continued on YouTube after the unfortunate clip was uploaded.

After the reaction on social media, Atkay responded in a series of tweets, the full text of which can be found below:

It was discovered that this terror organization was secretly messaging on war games. We made a news story about this last week. This is the link to the story. In our last report, we found the codes for another game in the books the members of the organization left in the trash as they were running away. That was one of those books. So we looked at other books as well. A lot of the books had similar notes. So we thought that the organization could have used other games in this way and we included it in our news story. For your information.

In her statement, Atkay refers to A Haber's piece that stated that the Turkish military used Clash of Kings chatrooms to plot the coup.

By the way, the website was the only outlet to report the use of the game in the attempted overthrow of the Turkish government.

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