The Egyptian government has intensified its presence on social media platforms, as citizens increasingly rely on these platforms as a main source of news, outperforming print journalism and traditional news websites in terms of speed of spread and interaction. With this shift, the official accounts of ministries and government bodies, foremost among them the Cabinet’s Media Centre, have become the state’s main tool for addressing public opinion and engaging with the ongoing debate.
Since the beginning of 2025, the government has adopted a fixed pattern in dealing with controversial issues, based on issuing statements that often begin with the phrase “There is no truth to what has been circulated…” and end with a categorical denial of the circulating information. However, this denial is mostly not accompanied by any announcement of the opening of an independent investigation, nor does it include evidence or detailed information refuting the content of the circulating claims. In many cases, the description “rumour” is used as a catch-all label for every account that differs from the official one, without providing clarifications or accurate alternatives to the denied information.
In the period from 1 January to 31 May 2025, Zawia3 monitored at least 25 official denial statements issued by the Media Centre and a number of ministries, led by the Ministry of Interior in terms of the number of statements. The issuance of these statements coincided with incidents that sparked wide public debate, in a rapid interaction by official bodies with what is published on digital platforms.
Among these cases, the controversy over “adulterated honey” came to show how official denial is employed in managing controversy without resorting to independent verification tools. Following the circulation of a video of two young men claiming in it that most honey products on the local market do not conform to standard specifications, the Media Centre hastened to issue a statement denying the accuracy of what was in the video, without announcing the withdrawal of samples or the conduct of tests by accredited regulatory bodies.
The statement, which merely described what was in the clip as “unscientific”, relied on a statement from the Food Safety Authority to the effect that “the method used in the analysis is unsound”, because the samples had been transferred from their original containers to other, unknown ones. Nevertheless, no alternative analysis conducted by an official laboratory was presented, and no results confirming the safety of the products in circulation were announced.
In parallel, MP Ayman Mehseb, a member of the House of Representatives, submitted an urgent briefing request regarding what he described as the spread of the phenomenon of honey adulteration in Egyptian markets, demanding urgent tests on the products, the transparent announcement of their results to public opinion and the withdrawal of non-compliant products, along with the imposition of deterrent penalties on the parties responsible for the violations, if any.
The “adulterated petrol” crisis: from denial to admission
At the beginning of last May, social media platforms flared up with complaints from citizens in several governorates about sudden breakdowns in their cars after refuelling at specific stations, raising suspicion of “adulterated petrol”. In response, the Cabinet’s Media Centre issued a statement affirming that the fuel “conforms to standard specifications”, denying any manipulation, without announcing an independent investigation or the withdrawal of samples for testing by a neutral regulatory body. The General Division of Petroleum Products at the Federation of Egyptian Chambers of Commerce went in the same direction, as it stated that it had not received complaints about non-compliant fuel, and that its contacts with distribution companies had not revealed any violations, which heightened the scepticism of technicians and citizens.
However, the Ministry of Petroleum backtracked within less than a week, admitting in an official statement to a defect in “limited” shipments distributed at some stations, and announced the withdrawal of the affected quantities and the opening of an internal investigation, after mounting complaints of impurities and pungent odours detected in the fuel, which caused, according to technicians, breakdowns in car pumps and engines. The ministry acknowledged receiving 870 official complaints between 4 and 9 May, and testing 807 samples collected from various governorates in cooperation with the ministries of petroleum and supply and neutral analysis laboratories; 802 samples were compliant, against five non-compliant samples.
At the parliamentary level, MP Dr Maha Abdel Nasser submitted a briefing request addressed to the Prime Minister and the ministers of petroleum and supply, in which she pointed to reports of oil spots and pungent odours in petrol and the possible addition of harmful diluting substances, stressing the damage to the engines of modern cars that rely on precise fuel injection systems, and calling for urgent oversight and accountability for those responsible. She also pointed to a noticeable gap between government statements and daily complaints, which raises questions about the effectiveness of the system.
In this context, professor of political science Dr Mostafa Kamel El-Sayed believes that the government’s way of managing the crisis embodies a bureaucratic pattern that relies on denial instead of confrontation or immediate investigation. He says, speaking to Zawia3, that official institutions tend to deny an incident to avoid highlighting a regulatory failure that could harm their image, since the bodies issuing the statements, foremost among them the Cabinet Information Centre, do not have the authority to investigate or hold to account. He points out that the confirmation of the accuracy of the petrol complaints required the intervention of the President of the Republic himself to open an investigation and identify those responsible, which exposed the inadequacy of the initial response, which relied on a “primitive” denial, as he describes it.
He adds that this approach assumes that the public lacks information or that the government holds a monopoly on the truth, thereby deepening the trust gap and weakening citizens’ engagement with the authorities’ directives, even when they are necessary. He stresses that the absence of parliamentary accountability and a free media allows this approach to continue, saying that in democratic systems such incidents do not pass without public accountability, while restrictions on the media and parliament’s failure to perform its oversight role lead to the absence of transparency, even though issues related to fuel safety affect citizens’ health and their safety on the roads, which makes the right to know the truth a necessity, not a luxury.
The Ministry of Interior: denial without investigation
The Ministry of Interior accounted for the largest share of the denial statements published on its official pages, as it did not issue any statement acknowledging the accuracy of the controversial incidents that surfaced over the past months, while denial remained a constant feature of its discourse, without any announcement of independent investigations or even public verification of the claims raised.
For example, the ministry denied that citizen Mahmoud Asaad had been subjected to torture inside El-Khalifa police station, which, according to the account of his family and his lawyer, led to his death days after his detention. The Interior Ministry affirmed that the death resulted from health causes, although initial forensic medicine reports indicated the presence of recent injuries that raise doubts about the circumstances of the death.
In another incident, the ministry denied that two young men had been killed in Matrouh governorate by security forces during a chase, affirming that the incident came as a result of an “exchange of fire” after they were suspected of involvement in criminal activities. But testimonies from the victims’ relatives and local residents cast doubt on the official account and demanded the opening of a fair and transparent investigation to uncover the circumstances of the incident.
The approach of denial extended to other incidents that attracted the attention of media outlets and human rights organisations, including allegations of mistreatment of detainees in some prisons and places of detention. The Egyptian Ministry of Interior denied what it described as “the claims circulating” on social media regarding a number of inmates of one of the “reform and rehabilitation” centres going on hunger strike in protest at the deterioration of their detention conditions.
In a statement published on the ministry’s official page, the Interior Ministry quoted a security source as affirming that “all reform and rehabilitation centres are equipped with all the necessary living and health facilities, and full care is provided to inmates in accordance with the highest international human rights standards”. The statement did not address any additional details regarding the centre in question, nor did it announce the opening of any independent investigation to verify what had been raised, despite repeated human rights complaints regarding reform centres and the treatment of prisoners.
A crisis of trust: absent oversight
Akram Ismail, a leading figure in the Bread and Freedom Party (under establishment) and a member of the Civil Democratic Movement, believes that the relationship between the state and society is going through a deep crisis of trust that has worsened with the growing role of social media in recent years. He affirms, speaking to Zawia3, that platforms such as Facebook have accelerated the circulation of news of varying credibility, so that many Egyptians have come to lean towards believing any account that reveals an administrative failure or detracts from the government’s competence, amid “an angry and sceptical public mood”.
This climate, according to Ismail, pushed the government to strengthen its digital presence, not only through “electronic committees”, but also through the official pages of the ministries of justice, foreign affairs and interior and the Cabinet Information Centre, in an effort to contain the content in circulation and influence public opinion. However, the denial statements issued often come out “truncated”: they do not reveal the results of investigations, nor do they commit to transparency or to subsequent steps, turning into superficial media responses that fail to meet the standard of accountability.
Ismail attributes this weakness to the absence of effective oversight tools, such as parliament and local councils, which are supposed to discuss these incidents and demand transparent investigations whose results are announced to public opinion. He says: “We are living in a situation in which rumours circulate and are met by a terse government denial that offers no clear picture of what is happening, with an almost complete absence of documented information about the results of investigations into controversial cases”.
He concludes by pointing out that “the facts are absent, and the tools of propaganda and disinformation are dominant, while citizens’ opportunities to access information or to comprehend what is being decided in their name and for their sake are shrinking”.
Freedom of information: a legislative vacuum
Mona Ezzat, a researcher on economic and social affairs, attributes the state of confusion between official institutions and society to the absence of a freedom of information law in Egypt, affirming, speaking to Zawia3, that passing this legislation has become an urgent necessity to guarantee transparency and accountability. Ezzat believes that the existence of a law regulating the right to know would achieve three basic objectives: the first is enabling citizens, and not only journalists and researchers, to have easy and free access to official data in the sectors of health, education, the environment and transport, as well as statistics on crime and assaults; the second is establishing the principle of accountability, so that bodies that deliberately withhold information or stop issuing periodic reports without a declared justification are held to account; the third objective is setting clear standards for the circulation of data, defining the publication tools and the responsibilities of employees, and regulating the timing of disclosure and the mechanism for appeal or objection.
Ezzat points out that the absence of this legal framework creates chaos in which each official acts according to their own judgement, citing what happened in Alexandria when TV presenter Lamees El-Hadidy asked an official at the Meteorological Authority why citizens had not been warned of the bad weather, and the official merely said that she had informed “the relevant authorities” and posted the matter on social media. Ezzat comments that the absence of a legal reference leaves each party with its own definition of “the minimum of transparency”.
She also notes that the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics has come to issue only partial reports, while some data has become available only in person or has stopped without an official announcement, an approach repeated in ministries that have stopped publishing periodic statistics on crime or social welfare without explanation. In addition, the government has appointed media spokespersons in the ministries, but most of them lack full powers or information, so they resort to denial or refrain from commenting while awaiting instructions, which entrenches the absence of transparency and turns the right to know into a privilege rather than a right.
Ezzat concludes that the frequency of denials, the delay of official comment and the contradictions between officials’ accounts are symptoms of the absence of clear legislation that imposes disclosure and holds violators to account. Although the 2014 Constitution, amended in 2019, stipulates in its Article (68) the right of citizens to obtain official information, data, statistics and documents, no comprehensive law defining the mechanisms of access and the duties of the state has been issued to this day, more than a decade later. This legislative vacuum not only obstructs the work of journalists and researchers, but also deprives citizens of oversight tools, and deepens the crisis of trust by entrenching a culture of withholding and denial in a number of government institutions.
