On 1 October, the Ministry of Interior, in its statement, described the six journalists of the Matsda2sh 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 to joining, together with the arrested defendants and others, the Brotherhood’s media committee.” Between the two statements, the same phrase recurred in television episodes, press material and circulated posts with identical vocabulary, at a time when the six were being held in undisclosed places of detention and their lawyers were not allowed to meet with them alone. What happened this week is not new in Egypt; but it is the occasion on which the entire week can be placed 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 supportive of the Egyptian government, in order to know what the evidence proves and what remains within the realm of “electronic committees” as a mutual accusation rather than a visible network.
One Week, One Narrative
The security campaign began on the evening of Monday 28 September with the arrest of Mohamed Ashraf Abu Umaira and Abdullah Qadri, then Islam Barakat, Omar Hilal, Mohamed Mahmoud and Mohamed Adel over the following hours, according to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, which is defending them. The Interior Ministry’s statement was issued about forty-eight hours later, describing the page as “unlicensed and run from abroad” and among the group’s “media committees,” and stating that one of the six is a registered member of the Journalists’ Syndicate. Over the following hours, as Zawia3 documented on 3 October, newspapers and channels considered close to 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, Abdelrahman Mansour, the name of a company in New York, and a mechanism of financial transfers, all attributed to unnamed “sources.” On the evening of 1 October, Al-Masry Al-Youm published a report that the six had been 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 before the investigation, according to what Mada Masr published.
In the first hour of 2 October, the Al-Ahram portal published an item saying that the security services had arrested six of those running the page, “among them Abdelrahman Mansour, a registered member of the Journalists’ Syndicate,” even though the Interior Ministry’s statement itself had described Mansour as “the fugitive abroad,” and built the item on an old clip of the late Brotherhood leader Essam Al-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, writer Abdel Rahim Ali, in a phone intervention with Amr Adeeb on MBC Masr, presented three audio recordings he said were of Mansour without disclosing their source, according to what the Cairo 24 website reported. On 3 October, users circulated old posts attributed to an account under the name of Abdullah Qadri on the X platform containing sympathy for the Brotherhood and the late president Mohamed Morsi, and news websites published screenshots of them as “confessions,” as the Telegraph Misr website noted, without anyone verifying the owner of the account or the date of the posts; then pro-government websites carried almost the same headlines, from Sada El Balad, which attributed to “one of those running Matsda2sh” that Qadri’s posts reveal his affiliation, to EgyIn, which described him in its headline as “the Brotherhood member.” On the same day, the Ministry of Interior vowed to take legal measures 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 put on record before the Supreme State Security Prosecution, in sessions on Sunday 4 October, that they had been subjected to restraint, blindfolding, beating, stripping and electric shocks at National Security premises, and that officers had forced them to read “confessions” from papers 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 is “one of the group’s media platforms.” The Initiative responded, according to Mada Masr, that the statement “conferred an untrue criminal character on 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-Hendi, director of the “Verify in Arabic” initiative, which specializes in fact-checking using open-source techniques, believes that talk of “electronic committees” requires “evidence, research behind it, and detailing 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 Matsda2sh: “I can bring a statement by the late Brotherhood leader Essam Al-Erian in which he talks about Abdelrahman Mansour’s membership of the Brotherhood, which is an old statement, and not include Mansour’s response to it, although he responded directly and said that he is not from the Brotherhood and that he left the group before the revolution.” The statement El-Hendi refers to was made by Al-Erian on ONtv on 2 September 2012, and Mansour responded to it on the same day, in remarks that the Elmwatin website republished this week, saying that he had separated from the group a year before the revolution and that the attempt to attribute the revolution to a particular organization does not reflect what happened. “Here is collective publishing that is not characterized by honesty and contains direct misleading; the video is posted and the rest of the matter is overlooked,” El-Hendi says, adding that the party presenting the narrative “may be security bodies, or political bodies, or individuals, or people with interests, whatever the party.”
He cites a second example: “Groups can publish an article by the late journalist Mohamed Abu El-Gheit, one of the founders of Matsda2sh, republished on a website affiliated with the Brotherhood, and then it is said that Abu El-Gheit worked on a Brotherhood platform, although the original version of the article is published in Al-Shorouk newspaper.” El-Hendi distinguishes between three patterns: misleading, which rests on information that is “correct in its origin but has a response, dimensions and context” and then the rest of it is overlooked; lying, which is “to bring incorrect information and refuse to clarify its truth to people”; and fabrication, which does not necessarily mean manufacturing material from scratch but “fabricating the idea or the text; I bring something and keep saying: this is evidence that it is such-and-such.” About the circulated audio recordings, he says: “When any reasonable person listens to them in full, he will find that there is nothing in them; a person greeting a person, or telling him what all people say.” He believes that “the biggest problem in 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 regarding “the charges attributed to the people being investigated.”
From the “National Party Committees” to the “State Committees”
The term itself has no 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 items published 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, meaning that the term was born to describe pro-Mubarak accounts that appeared after the internet returned on 5 February 2011. The accusation then moved, during the year of Mohamed Morsi’s rule, to the Muslim Brotherhood, with newspapers naming Khairat El-Shater as its “mastermind,” and since 2016 pro-government newspapers have openly celebrated state-backed committees, among them a Facebook group led by Sherif Khairy, before the 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 turned it into an “empty signifier” thrown at any hashtag that criticizes 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 tender specification prepared by the Ministry of Interior for a “social networks security risk monitoring” system, according to what Legal Agenda analysed at the time, and in the same year the Supreme Cybersecurity Council was established, with a committee inside 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 documented an office established by Public Prosecutor’s Decree No. 2376 of 2019 to create accounts on social media sites and to work as “a watchtower in cyberspace.” A study by Yezid Sayigh, issued by the Carnegie Middle East Center in May 2025 under the title “The Second Republic,” concluded that the regime has sought to dominate the public sphere and media discourse and to expand the role of the security agencies 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 that comprised 259 accounts, 102 pages, five groups and seventeen Instagram accounts, whose pages were followed by more than 13.7 million accounts, which spent about $167,000 on advertising, and which posted about alleged Qatari and Turkish support for terrorism, Iran’s activity in Yemen and the war in Libya; 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 is 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, the researcher at the Arab Center, says 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, information that is exclusive to him 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 Emirati company Charles Communications, the Nigerian MintReach and the Egyptian Flexell; 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 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 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, one group and 76 Instagram accounts, which it linked to an Egyptian marketing company called “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 deletion of 2,541 accounts in Egypt within the “El Fagr” network, which it said had created inauthentic accounts to amplify messages criticizing Iran, Qatar and Turkey, and that “information we obtained from outside indicates that it was taking its 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 percent of them in Arabic, praising the Egyptian government and President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and attacking the Brotherhood, Qatar, Iran and Turkey, while supporting Khalifa Haftar in Libya and backing the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The researchers noted that the network resembles a “media asset” more than a “mercenary organization” or a government, and that the weekly newspaper, founded in 2005, is owned by El Fagr for Printing and Publishing 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 access.
Five removal operations in eight months covering six networks, around 3,050 accounts, pages and groups on Meta platforms by Zawia3’s count, 2,541 accounts on Twitter, three Egyptian marketing companies and a newspaper, and one sentence from one platform about “direction from the government.” This is all of the public evidence, and it is plentiful enough to refute the idea that pro-government discourse is entirely spontaneous, and too scant to prove that a single apparatus runs it.
A Network That Keeps Reappearing
What the platforms did not delete, researchers documented. On 23 March 2023, the Digital Forensic Research Lab described a network of 21 active accounts on Twitter, noting coordination among at least twelve of them, that amplified the hashtag “#هندعم_السيسي_ل2030” (“We will support Sisi for 2030,” around 55,400 tweets) and the hashtag “#كل_الدعم_لرجال_الشرطة” (“All support for the policemen,” around 10,600); the same accounts then used a hashtag to mock the fact-checking platform Saheeh Masr (around a thousand tweets), and the lab said the goal was 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 monitored the hashtag “#مصر_تدعم_حقوق_الانسان” (“Egypt supports human rights”), launched by an account on 21 March 2023, the day the president announced a pardon for 85 imprisoned debtors, 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 the campaign of the hashtags “#يسقط_نقيب_المهندسين” (“Down with the head of the Engineers Syndicate”) and “#نعم_لسحب_الثقه” (“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 following day, and then died down: one account used the two hashtags 209 times, another 163 times in less than an hour, five accounts posted the same text in the same order, three posted the statement of the Mostaqbal Watan party in the same minute, and two accounts that had previously appeared in campaigns against 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, with the same vocabulary and in 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 organized 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 the essential difference is that broad popular support “does not need the impersonation of identities or the operation of thousands of accounts in a coordinated manner,” and that the link of more than one network to specialized marketing companies suggests that digital influence was organized 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 rather 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 circulating news, so that it becomes detached from its original source and gains credibility from the volume of circulation, not from verification. He believes these methods are effective in the short term in controlling the official narrative and preventing any debate on public policies, but in the long term they lead to a loss of trust between citizens and state institutions and a tendency to believe counter-rumours.
This battle takes place in an unequal arena. The number of internet users in Egypt reached 96.3 million in January 2025, a penetration rate of 81.9 percent, while the advertising audience of the X platform, where most hashtag campaigns are measured, does not exceed 5.22 million users, compared with 48.7 million for Facebook. In other words, 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 100, 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 start 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 confronts coordinated hashtags thus confronts, at the same time, blocking and arrest, 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 its direction from the Egyptian government.” Since that day, the platforms have not added a similar sentence, settling for the names of marketing companies, and researchers have stopped at the phrase “pro-government.” On 7 October 2026, the Public Prosecution wrote that a fact-checking page is “one of the media platforms” of a terrorist group, after a week in which the journalists said they had read their confessions from papers 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 party 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.
