Opened in a ceremony with the attendance of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on June 1, the tower was initially presented to the public by the government as the "new symbol of Istanbul."

Located on one of the tallest hills in the city of Istanbul, the tower was widely considered by the public to not be worthy to be dubbed a symbol considering the centuries-old local history.

Social media users quickly took to digitally altering snapshots of the structure, with one replacing it with a lighter and captioning it "This doesn't stand out at all."

Another social media user added a drill to the tower's design, joking that the industrial-looking structure was modeled after the power tool.