The Presidential Communications Directorate, viewed by many as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s propaganda headquarters, has tripled its workforce while increasing its expenditures twelvefold since its establishment in 2018, Turkish minute reported, citing the Birgün daily.
The budget allocated to the directorate, which was TL 344 million ($10.1 million) in 2019, increased to TL 4.1 billion ($120 million) in 2024. It spent TL 2.8 billion ($82.4 million) during the first six months of the year, Birgün said.
The directorate, which began operations in 2018 with 584 employees, has more than 1,600 employees as of September 2024.
According to Birgün, the institution received an allocation of TL 145 million ($4.2 million) to increase the size of its service buildings after outgrowing its current 25-story headquarters due to the rise in the number of personnel.
The communications directorate, led by Fahrettin Altun, has been under scrutiny for its crucial role in shaping and disseminating the government’s messaging under President Erdoğan’s administration and combating what it terms disinformation.
Since its establishment under a presidential decree in July 2018, shortly after Erdoğan was elected president for the first time under a presidential system of governance, the directorate has faced criticism for its perceived efforts to manipulate public perception in favor of Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) government while also spreading disinformation about the president’s opponents, especially during election periods.
Then-main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) deputy group chairman and current leader Özgür Özel, told Birgün two months before the 2023 general election that the communications directorate, which he described as Erdoğan’s “propaganda ministry,” had turned into a media empire that manages dozens of TV stations and newspapers. He added that those media outlets were spreading disinformation and defaming opposition politicians more aggressively with the use of public resources ahead of the election.
Official figures showed that the directorate spent TL 282,963,000 ($14.3 million) in April 2023, which corresponded to 43.7 percent of its total expenditure of TL 647,073,000 ($32.7 million) during the first quarter of the year.
Altun attracted harsh criticism in February 2023 when he introduced a smartphone app allowing users to report people who are believed to have produced or disseminated fake news or disinformation online as the country was grappling with the repercussions of two powerful earthquakes that killed over 50,000 people in southern Turkey.
The app came after opposition politicians, journalists and human rights activists who have been reporting on the latest situation, mostly from regions affected by the earthquake, accused the AKP of poor performance in coordinating search and rescue efforts after the massive quakes.
