On 1 October, the Ministry of Interior, in its statement, described the six journalists of the “Matsada2sh” platform as a “media committee” affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, and on 7 October the Public Prosecution said that one of the defendants “admitted during the investigations that he, the arrested defendants and others had joined the media committee of the Muslim Brotherhood”. Between the two statements, the same phrase was repeated in television episodes, press material and circulated posts in identical vocabulary, at a time when the six were in undisclosed places of detention and their lawyers had not been allowed to meet them in private. What happened this week is nothing new in Egypt; but it is the occasion on which the whole week can be set alongside what Meta, Twitter, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and the Stanford Internet Observatory have documented about the networks that produce and amplify discourse loyal to the Egyptian government, in order to find out what the evidence proves and what remains within the circle of “electronic committees” as a mutual accusation rather than a visible network.
One week and one narrative
The security campaign began on the evening of Monday 28 September with the arrest of Mohamed Ashraf Abu Omeira and Abdullah Kadry, then Islam Barakat, Omar Helal, Mohamed Mahmoud and Mohamed Adel during the following hours, according to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), which is handling their defence. The Interior Ministry’s statement was issued about forty-eight hours later, describing the page as “unlicensed and run from abroad” and as part of the group’s “media committees”, and stating that one of the six was registered with the Journalists Syndicate. During the following hours, as Zawia3 documented on 3 October, newspapers and channels aligned with the state relayed the same narrative in the same vocabulary, and added to it what the statement had not said: a biography of the father of the platform’s founder, Abdel Rahman Mansour, the name of a company in New York, and a mechanism for money transfers, all attributed to unnamed “sources”. On the evening of 1 October, the Al-Masry Al-Youm website published a news item about the six being remanded in custody for fifteen days, which their lawyers denied, and Hossam Bahgat, the Initiative’s executive director, said that the head of the Supreme State Security Prosecution had denied to him that any of them had been brought for interrogation, according to what Mada Masr published.
In the first hour of 2 October, the Al-Ahram Gate published material in which it said the security services had arrested six of those running the page, “among them Abdel Rahman Mansour, registered with the Journalists Syndicate”, even though the Interior Ministry’s statement itself had described Mansour as “the fugitive abroad”, and the piece was built on an old clip of the late Brotherhood leader Essam El-Erian to say that its circulation constitutes “a practical response” to those who said Mansour’s arrest was arbitrary. On the evening of the same day, the writer Abdel Rahim Ali, in a phone-in with Amr Adib on “MBC Masr”, played three audio recordings he said were of Mansour without revealing their source, according to what the “Cairo 24” website reported. On 3 October, users circulated old posts attributed to an account in the name of Abdullah Kadry on the platform “X” containing sympathy with the Brotherhood and the late president Mohamed Morsi, and news websites published screenshots of them as “confessions”, as the “Telegraph Misr” website observed, without anyone verifying the owner of the account or the date of the posts; pro-government websites then carried almost the same headlines, from “Sada El-Balad”, which attributed to “one of those running Matsada2sh” the claim that Kadry’s posts reveal his affiliation, to “Egy In”, which described him in its headline as “the Brotherhood member”. On the same day, the Ministry of Interior vowed to take legal action against “promoters of the allegations” on pages it said were affiliated with the Brotherhood.
Then came what the journalists themselves said when they finally appeared before the prosecution. The Egyptian Initiative said, citing the defence lawyers who were present, that some of the journalists had placed on record before the Supreme State Security Prosecution, in sessions on Sunday 4 October, that they had been restrained, blindfolded, beaten, stripped and subjected to electric shocks at National Security premises, and that officers had forced them to read “confessions” from sheets of paper in front of the camera. Three days later, the prosecution said in its statement that it had referred three of those who claimed coercion to forensic medicine, whose reports established “that they were free of injuries and that there were no signs indicating the use of violence against them”, that the defendants had admitted receiving periodic sums in dollars from a company owned by a fugitive member abroad, and that the page was “one of the group’s media platforms”. The Initiative responded, according to “Mada Masr”, that the statement “gave an untrue criminal character to legitimate acts”. Thus the circle closed: the phrase that began in the police statement before any of the six had been asked a single question became, a week later, an admission attributed to them in the prosecution’s statement, by way of screens, websites and posts that reproduced it every day.
What a fact-checker sees
Journalist Hossam El-Hindi, director of the “Verify in Arabic” initiative, which specialises in fact-checking information using open-source techniques, believes that talk of “electronic committees” needs “evidence, research behind it and a detailed breakdown of each case separately”, and prefers the concept of “collective publishing”: a narrative or a piece of information circulated collectively through accounts and individuals and in different forms of content. He tells Zawia3 that collective publishing “is not a problem in itself if people are relaying correct information”, but the problem begins when an incident or a statement is presented while the response and the context are omitted.
He gives the example of what happened with Matsada2sh: “I could bring a statement by the late Brotherhood leader Essam El-Erian in which he speaks about Abdel Rahman Mansour belonging to the Brotherhood, which is an old statement, and not include Mansour’s response to it, even though he responded directly and said that he is not from the Brotherhood and that he left the group before the revolution.” The statement El-Hindi refers to was made by El-Erian on the “ON TV” channel on 2 September 2012, and Mansour responded to it on the same day, in statements that the “Al-Mowatin” website republished this week, saying that he had split from the group a year before the revolution and that the attempt to attribute the revolution to a particular organisation does not reflect what happened. “Here there is collective publishing that is not honest and contains direct disinformation; the video is posted and the rest of the matter is overlooked,” says El-Hindi, adding that the party presenting the narrative “may be security bodies, or political bodies, or individuals, or people with interests, whatever the party”.
He mentions a second example: “Groups may publish an article by the late journalist Mohamed Abu El-Ghait, one of the founders of Matsada2sh, republished on a website affiliated with the Brotherhood, and then it is said that Abu El-Ghait worked at a Brotherhood platform, even though the original version of the article was published in Al-Shorouk newspaper.” El-Hindi distinguishes between three patterns: disinformation, which rests on information that is “correct in its origin but has a response, has dimensions and has a context” and then the rest of it is overlooked; lying, which is “bringing information that is not correct and refusing to clarify its truth to people”; and fabrication, which does not necessarily mean manufacturing the material from scratch but “fabricating the idea or the text; I bring something and keep saying: this is proof that he is such-and-such”. About the circulating audio recordings he says: “When any reasonable person listens to them in full, they will find that there is nothing in them; a person greeting another person, or telling him what all people say.” He believes that “the biggest problem with the idea of collective publishing” is the use of a large number of accounts to cement a narrative that is “for the most part misleading and incorrect”, and that these narratives are used to cement a storyline about “the charges attributed to the people under investigation”.
From the “National Party committees” to the “state committees”
The term itself does not have a neutral history. In a study published by researchers Nermeen El-Sherif and Tarek Anwar in the International Journal of Communication in 2024, after analysing 110 Egyptian press articles between 2011 and 2021 in “Al-Ahram”, “Youm7”, “El-Watan”, “Al-Shorouk”, “Al-Masry Al-Youm” and “Sasa Post”, it emerged that the first press reference to “electronic committees” dates back to 26 February 2011 in “Youm7” and concerned the committees of the National Democratic Party; that is, the term was born to describe pro-Mubarak accounts that appeared after the internet returned on 5 February 2011. Then, during the year of Mohamed Morsi’s rule, the accusation shifted to the Muslim Brotherhood, and newspapers named Khairat El-Shater its “mastermind”; and from 2016 pro-government newspapers began openly celebrating state-backed committees, among them a Facebook group led by Sherif Khairy, before official discourse returned to holding the Brotherhood, Turkey and Qatar responsible for every opposition hashtag. The study concludes that the excessive use of the term has turned it into an “empty signifier” thrown at any hashtag that criticises the government, and that this very ambiguity is one of the tools of digital authoritarianism.
In parallel, the state built its official tools. In June 2014, “Al-Bawaba” newspaper revealed a book of tender specifications prepared by the Ministry of Interior for a “social media security risk monitoring” system, according to what “Legal Agenda” analysed at the time; in the same year the Supreme Council for Cybersecurity was established, with a committee within it to follow cyberspace and monitor what the authorities describe as “deviant” opinions and terrorism-related content, without a definition of either term, as researchers Bassant Hassib and James Shires wrote in a study published in the “Journal of Cybersecurity” in 2021. In a study published by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in October 2020, researcher Mostafa El-Sayed Hussein identified an office established by Public Prosecutor’s Decree No. 2376 of 2019 to create accounts on social media and act as “a watchtower in cyberspace”. A study by Yezid Sayigh issued by the Carnegie Middle East Center in May 2025, entitled “The Second Republic”, concluded that the regime sought to dominate the public sphere and media discourse and to expand the role of the security services in managing the political sphere.
Six networks in eight months
What the platforms hold is the only part of this file that is measured in numbers. On 1 August 2019, Facebook announced the removal of a network originating in Egypt and the UAE comprising 259 accounts, 102 pages, five groups and seventeen Instagram accounts, whose pages were followed by more than 13.7 million accounts; it spent about $167,000 on advertising, and posted about alleged Qatari and Turkish support for terrorism, Iran’s activity in Yemen and the war in Libya, and the company said its investigation found links to two marketing companies: “New Waves” in Egypt and “Newave” in the UAE. When the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab analysed the network two weeks later, it found that the person most likely behind “New Waves” was Amr Hussein, under whose email address other entities had been registered and whose personal blog the company’s pages promoted, that the company had been operating since 2015, and that its content paralleled the political interests of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Bahrain; but it said explicitly that it had not found a “direct link to any government”. Mostafa El-Sayed Hussein, a researcher at the Arab Center, says that the company was headed by a former army officer, and that he identified three of its five employees who, after its closure, moved to similar jobs in official bodies, a piece of information that he alone has and that neither the platform nor the lab has confirmed.
On 3 October 2019, Facebook removed two networks at once: the first originating in the UAE, Egypt and Nigeria (211 accounts, 107 pages, 43 groups and 87 Instagram accounts), which it linked to the companies “Charles Communications” of the UAE, “MintReach” of Nigeria and “Flexell” of Egypt; and the second originating in Egypt alone (163 accounts, 51 pages, 33 groups and four Instagram accounts), followed by 5.6 million accounts, whose pages presented themselves as independent local media outlets in Somalia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Iran, Turkey, Lebanon and Qatar, and the company said its investigation “found links to an Egyptian newspaper, El Fagr”. In February 2020 it removed the largest network: 333 accounts, 195 pages, nine groups and 1,194 Instagram accounts, which originated in Egypt and targeted the Middle East and North Africa, and which it linked to the two companies “New Waves” and “Flexell”, which it said had previously violated its policies. In March 2020 it removed a fourth network of 81 accounts, 82 pages, a group and 76 Instagram accounts, which it linked to an Egyptian marketing company named “Maat”. In all four of these cases, Facebook attributed the networks to companies, not to the state.
The only exception came from Twitter. On 2 April 2020, the company announced the removal of 2,541 accounts in Egypt as part of the “El Fagr” network, which it said had created inauthentic accounts to amplify messages criticising Iran, Qatar and Turkey, and that “information we gained externally indicates it was taking direction from the Egyptian government”. The Stanford Internet Observatory, in a paper prepared by Renée DiResta, Tara Kheradpir and Carly Miller on the same day, analysed the data that Twitter made available: 7.9 million tweets, 84.5% of them in Arabic, praising the Egyptian government and President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and attacking the Brotherhood, Qatar, Iran and Turkey, supporting Khalifa Haftar in Libya and backing the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The researchers noted that the network resembled “a media asset” more than “a mercenary organisation” or a government, and that the weekly newspaper, founded in 2005, is owned by the “El Fagr for Printing and Publishing” company and its editor-in-chief is Mostafa Thabet. Neither the three companies nor the newspaper published a public response to the removal decisions that Zawia3 was able to find.
Five takedowns in eight months covering six networks, around 3,050 accounts, pages and groups on Meta’s platforms by Zawia3’s count, and 2,541 accounts on Twitter, three Egyptian marketing companies and a newspaper, and a single sentence from a single platform about “direction from the government”. This is the entire public evidence, and it is enough to refute the claim that pro-government discourse is entirely spontaneous, and too little to prove that a single apparatus runs it.
A network that keeps reappearing
What the platforms did not remove, the researchers documented. On 23 March 2023, the Digital Forensic Research Lab described a network of 21 active accounts on Twitter, observing coordination between at least twelve of them, which amplified the hashtag “#We_Will_Support_Sisi_to_2030” (about 55,400 tweets) and the hashtag “#All_Support_to_the_Policemen” (about 10,600); the same accounts then used a hashtag to mock the fact-checking platform “Saheeh Masr” (about one thousand tweets), and the lab said the aim was most likely “to build a false perception of broad support for the government” and “to discredit fact-checking initiatives”. On 31 May 2023, researcher Dina Sadek at the same lab tracked the hashtag “#Egypt_Supports_Human_Rights”, which was launched by an account on 21 March 2023, the day the president announced a pardon for 85 debtors, and which reached 1,084 mentions from 352 users; three of the five most active accounts in it were members of the same network of twenty-one accounts, and several accounts posted the same tweet with the same image within minutes.
Then, on 19 October 2023, the lab documented a campaign using the hashtags “#Down_with_the_Head_of_the_Engineers_Syndicate” and “#Yes_to_withdrawing_confidence” against the head of the Engineers Syndicate, Tarek El-Nabarawy, which peaked on 30 and 31 May 2023, the day of the vote on withdrawing confidence and the day after, and then died down: one account used the two hashtags 209 times, and another 163 times in less than an hour, five accounts posted the same text in the same order, and three posted a statement by the Mostaqbal Watan Party in the same minute, and two accounts that had previously appeared in campaigns against the human rights defenders George Ishak and Gamal Eid took part in the campaign. In all three cases, the lab described the accounts as “pro-government” and “likely inauthentic”, and did not say that the state runs them. What these reports prove, then, is not the identity of the operator, but that a single structure of accounts is activated at every event: supporting the president, praising the police, defending the human rights record, toppling a syndicate head, smearing a fact-checker, in the same vocabulary and within the same minutes.
What the platforms measure
Platforms do not judge networks by their content but by their behaviour. Meta’s standards define “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” as organised cooperation between accounts to mislead people about the identity of those behind them or the nature of their activity, and it is inferred from the timing of posting, the repetition of wording, the reuse of images and links, and the way identity is concealed. A cybersecurity expert, who spoke to Zawia3 on condition that his name not be mentioned, says that the essential difference is that broad popular support “does not need identity impersonation or the coordinated operation of thousands of accounts”, and that the link of more than one network to specialised marketing companies suggests that digital influence was organised through a semi-professional structure, “even if the public data does not reveal the full chain of command and funding”. He describes two tactics that explain the effectiveness of these networks: “flooding”, by pumping large quantities of posts and hashtags at close intervals so that they fill users’ feeds and push competing narratives to the margins, which does not require fully automated accounts but central or semi-central management with a single message, hashtag and timing; and “recycling”, by planting a piece of information in inauthentic accounts and then recycling it through other pages until it appears on pro-government websites as a news item in circulation, so that it becomes detached from its original source and gains credibility from the volume of circulation rather than from verification. He believes these methods are effective in the short term in controlling the official narrative and preventing any discussion of public policies, but in the long term they lead to a loss of trust between the citizen and state institutions and to an inclination to believe counter-rumours.
This battle is taking place in an unequal arena. The number of internet users in Egypt reached 96.3 million people in January 2025, a penetration rate of 81.9%, while the advertising audience of the platform “X”, where most hashtag campaigns are measured, does not exceed 5.22 million users, compared with 48.7 million for Facebook. That is, a hashtag that tops “X” with tens of thousands of tweets from a few dozen accounts reaches an audience nine times smaller than the audience reached by the websites and pages that republish it as a “trend”. In the other direction, the law is at work: Freedom House’s 2025 “Freedom on the Net” report classified Egypt as “Not Free” with 28 points out of a hundred, and recorded the blocking of the Zawia3 website inside Egypt in February 2025 as part of the blocking of news websites by decision of the Supreme Council for Media Regulation. Amnesty International said on 18 July 2024 that security forces had arbitrarily detained 119 people since the beginning of the month over calls on social media to protest on 12 July against prices and power cuts, and then documented the arrest of cartoonist Ashraf Omar on 22 July. The user who faces coordinated hashtags faces blocking and arrest at the same time, which makes the distance between an “electronic committee” attacking a journalist and an investigating authority detaining him shorter than it appears.
What remains of the evidence
On 2 April 2020, Twitter wrote the only sentence in which a global platform named who directs an Egyptian network: “taking direction from the Egyptian government”. Since that day, the platforms have not added a similar sentence, confining themselves to the names of marketing companies, and the researchers have stopped at the phrase “pro-government”. On 7 October 2026, the Public Prosecution wrote that a fact-checking page was “one of the media platforms” of a terrorist group, after a week in which the journalists said they had read their confessions from sheets of paper in front of the camera. Between the two sentences stands the conclusion of El-Sherif and Anwar: that “electronic committees” has become an empty signifier that each side throws at the other, and that the ambiguity itself is the tool. A state that has a cybersecurity council, an office in the prosecution for creating accounts and a law that blocks websites does not need to prove that a given platform is a committee; it is enough for it to say so in a statement, and then leave it to networks whose operators nobody knows to repeat it until it becomes an admission.
