{"id":16461,"date":"2026-09-30T14:10:31","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T12:10:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/?p=16461"},"modified":"2026-10-24T14:54:56","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T12:54:56","slug":"matsda2sh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/matsda2sh\/","title":{"rendered":"The Arrest of Egypt’s Entire Fact-Checking Team Is a Message to Every Journalist: Just Believe Us"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the evening of Monday 28 September, security forces raided the homes of journalists Mohamed Ashraf Abu Omeira and Abdullah Qadri, and seized their phones and computers. Over the following hours the campaign widened: Islam Barakat from his home in Gharbia, Omar Helal from Port Said, then Mohamed Mahmoud and Mohamed Adel from a street in Cairo, <\/span>according to what was documented by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR),<\/span><\/a> which handles the legal representation of the platform’s team and called on the Public Prosecutor, Counsellor Mohamed Shawky, to open an urgent investigation to reveal where they are being held. Six names in less than one day, the entire journalistic team of the “Matsda2sh” platform, without any official body announcing a single charge, or even acknowledging that it is holding anyone, as of the writing of these words.<\/span><\/p>\n

This security crackdown came in the middle of an entire official season whose headline is media openness: a ministerial invitation to professional “venting”, announced preparations for an annual media conference, and continuous talk of presidential directives to allow opinion and counter-opinion.<\/span><\/p>\n

“Matsda2sh” does not publish opinions, as far as is known about it, and if it did, that would of course not be a crime. Its very name is its work programme: do not believe before you verify. The platform began its activity about eight years ago, and belongs to a well-established global journalistic specialism, fact-checking, whose foundation is that the editor picks up a circulating claim, an official statement, a widespread news item or a shared image, then matches it against the original documents and data and publishes the result with the evidence. The only tool of this journalistic work is the document; it is the only profession that holds itself publicly to account in every line it publishes.<\/span><\/p>\n

When the platform suffered its first documented blow, in August 2023, the details revealed the nature of the anger at it. A security force raided the home of its editor Karim Asaad in Al-Shorouk City at dawn, and, <\/span>according to what the platform and the Freedoms Committee of the Journalists Syndicate documented at the time<\/span><\/a>, he and his wife were assaulted and threatened through their son, then “Matsda2sh”‘s accounts were accessed and two posts were deleted concerning the identity of Egyptian passengers on a plane seized in Zambia loaded with cash and gold. Three years later it has become the whole team, all at once. The issue is that this team does not want us to believe lies.<\/span><\/p>\n


\n<\/span><\/p>\n

A War on Rumours Without Fact-Checkers<\/b><\/h2>\n

The first contradiction begins here, and proving it does not require the state’s opponents; its own discourse is enough. Just five weeks before the campaign, on 20 August, the Minister of State for Media, Diaa Rashwan, addressed his lengthy statement to journalists, which in Youm7’s coverage carried a headline summing up the entire official doctrine: <\/span>“We confront rumours and protect freedom of opinion through the law”<\/span><\/a>. The rumour, then, according to the text of the official discourse and at its highest levels, is a declared enemy against which the state is waging an open war, and in every meeting it warns of its effect on the “internal front”.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So what is a platform whose exclusive specialism is refuting rumours with documents? By the logic of this very discourse, it is a volunteer in the declared war, and in its front line specifically. Yet what happened was the complete opposite: the soldiers of the war on rumours were arrested to the last one in less than a day. This contradiction has a single explanation, supported by the deletion of the two posts in 2023: the problem, then, is not that there are people refuting false news, but that there are people refuting it outside the authority of the state.<\/span>
\n<\/span> Refutation, then, in the official doctrine: if we practise it as a professional act available to us because we hold the evidence, we become a rival to the state in its exclusive right to decide what is true. What is required is that we simply believe.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Venting on the Host’s Terms<\/b><\/h2>\n

The second contradiction concerns the invitation on which the entire season of promises was built. In <\/span>the appeal of 20 August<\/span><\/a>, Rashwan presented himself as an old colleague before being a minister, described his message as “necessary venting”, and announced preparations for an annual media meeting in December, in implementation of presidential directives to open the space to opinion and counter-opinion. However, the test of any invitation lies not in its text but in its track record, and the track record of this invitation is documented. Zawia3 found, in <\/span>an earlier report by our colleague Shimaa Hamdy<\/span><\/a>, that the “media reform” file has passed since 2023 through six successive official stations, among them a committee that held 175 hours of discussion, whose final report the head of the Supreme Council for Media Regulation, Khaled Abdel Aziz, handed to the Prime Minister on 5 February 2026; it then asked four editors-in-chief of independent websites, all of whom denied that anyone had contacted them or invited them to anything. Six stations, a final report and 175 hours of talk, and zero results. In this track record, the function of the invitation to dialogue is to produce the scene of openness without regard to its conditions, and to let the occasion for speech take the place of its freedom.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n


\n<\/span>Then the last week of September came to put the invitation and reality in a single frame that admits no interpretation. On 21 September the minister met editors-in-chief of licensed websites and proposed <\/span>a “unified entity” that websites would join as institutions<\/span><\/a>, and the journalistic community exploded. The Syndicate’s Secretary-General, Gamal Abdel Rahim, recalled that any parallel syndicate violates Article 77 of the Constitution, which restricts each profession to a single syndicate, and the Syndicate’s Deputy Head, Mohamed El-Garhy, <\/span>submitted an official memorandum demanding that the minister himself be moved to the register of non-practising members<\/span><\/a>, and <\/span>the controversy continued for days<\/span><\/a>, forcing the minister to deny what had been understood from his words. And one week after the proposal to organise news websites in an entity under the ministry’s patronage, the team of an entire news website was arrested. These two events, side by side, explain the philosophy of the whole season: speech is welcome when it takes place inside a hall whose guest list and agenda are set by the host, and criminalised when it takes place outside it. The six journalists did not even test the limits of the promised “venting”, because they do not work in opinion at all; they did not vent and did not declare a position, but practised the most basic level of safety assumed in any media system: matching the news with the evidence. If this is the fate of those who verify, let everyone invited to the December hall imagine what awaits those who express themselves.<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Those Who Preceded Them to the Same Questions<\/b><\/h2>\n

Because the campaign is not the first, placing it in its record reveals the rule that governs all the cases. On 22 July 2024 a plainclothes security force stormed the home of Ashraf Omar, the cartoonist at the “Al-Manassa” website, and took him away handcuffed and blindfolded to an unknown location, and he remained disappeared for two days during which he was subjected, <\/span>according to what eleven human rights organisations documented<\/span><\/a>, to beatings and threats of electric shocks, before appearing before the Supreme State Security Prosecution on the usual charges: joining a terrorist group, spreading false news, and misusing social media. His documented “crime” was cartoons criticising the sale of state assets and power cuts, and his detention was renewed in <\/span>video sessions, one of which did not exceed a quarter of an hour<\/span><\/a>. Days before him, journalist Khaled Mamdouh was arrested and disappeared for days before appearing before the same prosecution. And last May, <\/span>the State Security Prosecution questioned three members of the Committee for the Defence of Prisoners of Conscience in Case No. 4502 of 2026<\/span><\/a> on a charge of spreading false news, for no reason other than their joining a committee that defends detainees.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A cartoonist criticising the sale of assets, a journalist covering events, defenders of prisoners, and fact-checkers: four categories that can hardly be united by a single political position, yet are united by a single charge that never changes. And when the charge of “spreading false news” stretches to cover satirical cartoons, news coverage, legal defence and the fact-checking of false news itself, the charge has definitively detached from the facts and become an open-ended power, and “lying” here becomes a lie according to who is arrested. The result is that Egypt is <\/span>ranked 169th out of 180 countries in the 2026 Press Freedom Index<\/span><\/a> issued by Reporters Without Borders, and it is <\/span>the sixth country in the world that jails the most journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists<\/span><\/a>, which counted 18 Egyptian journalists behind bars in its latest report, seven of whom were imprisoned specifically for covering the economic crisis. Even before this week’s campaign.<\/span><\/p>\n

The timing here has its documented irony: the campaign came days before <\/span>the new Criminal Procedure Law entered into force in October 2026<\/span><\/a>, the law the state has long marketed as a historic remedy for the issue of pretrial detention, with seven alternatives to detention instead of three and controls on its duration. Thus the law restricting pretrial detention was received by filling the cells hours before it took effect, with six detainees whose whereabouts and charges are unknown, that is, outside any guarantees, old and new alike.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

The Membership Card and the Locked Door<\/b><\/h2>\n

From another angle, the campaign opens the file that has been boiling beneath the surface of the profession for years: where does the Journalists Syndicate stand on all of this, and why are online journalists waging their battle to join it? The Syndicate, outside of which an “entity” is intended for the institutions of online journalists, is the very one that has stood every time with those not registered on its rolls. On the night following the raids, the Syndicate’s Freedoms Committee issued <\/span>a statement declaring its full solidarity with Abdullah Qadri and Mohamed Ashraf<\/span><\/a>, described their arrest and the search of one of their homes as “a violation of the law and the Constitution”, and demanded the immediate and comprehensive release of both of them and of all those detained in opinion and publishing cases. The committee’s head, Eman Ouf, said that adding new journalists to the list of detainees “throws the law and the Constitution against the wall”, then, while following up on <\/span>complaints about the arrest of six colleagues at the platform<\/span><\/a> as the Head of the Journalists Syndicate, Khaled El-Balshy, worked around the clock to secure their release, she summed up the philosophy of the whole position in five words: “No difference between Syndicate member and non-member”. It is the same position the Syndicate took with Karim Asaad in 2023, when its intervention led to his release within less than two days, and with Ashraf Omar from his first hour, when El-Balshy said <\/span>“We are witnessing a return to the arrest of journalists instead of the release of the detainees whose release we are demanding”<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

That is precisely why online journalists want to join the Syndicate, and that is precisely why the door remains locked. Registration grants the journalist legal recognition of their status, procedural guarantees during investigation, and a social umbrella, and above all belonging to a body that cries out when they are arrested, and its cry may make a difference, as happened with Asaad. But membership alone, and let us say it with complete frankness, does not protect us from the cells. Real protection is a legal environment in which matching the news with the document is not a potential crime. Yet the difference between the presence of the umbrella and its absence remains the difference between someone who is arrested and an entire professional home cries out for them, and someone who is arrested in a silence documented only by a human rights organisation’s statement. In this light, the “entity” project is not a solution to the crisis of online journalists but an entrenchment of their isolation: their institutions in a union under the ministry’s eye, and their individuals without status or umbrella, in the soft gap from which the entire “Matsda2sh” team was snatched.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

When the Testing Laboratory Is Imprisoned<\/b><\/h2>\n

All of the above may seem a professional matter concerning a small community. It is not, for reasons that affect every citizen who pays a bill and makes a decision. The country is going through a moment of successive decisions on prices, debt, water and land, and making the right decision, by the government before the citizen, presupposes tested information. Zawia3 documented in an earlier report<\/a> dozens of contradictory official statements on the same files, a statement denying today what tomorrow’s statement affirms. In an environment like this, independent verification is a public utility in the full sense of the word, just like a medical testing laboratory: it is hostile neither to the patient nor to the doctor; it only prevents treatment from being based on guesswork. And a state that imprisons the laboratory technicians and then complains about the spread of infection has written its own diagnosis.<\/p>\n

Moreover, imprisoning fact-checkers hands the rumour its complete victory. A rumour is defeated by a third party whose independence people trust. When this party is silenced, the public is left between two options, each worse than the other: to believe everything that reaches them and be governed by rumour, or to believe nothing at all, including what is true in the state’s own words, so that the value of any official statement collapses in advance. Both options are a demolition of public trust deeper in effect than any post ever deleted from any account.<\/p>\n

As for the message that every journalist in Egypt received this week, it is no longer “do not oppose”, for that is an old, understood message. The message now is that the truth itself, stripped of any opinion, is a risk. And when members of the profession absorb that, each of them will step back one more step from the facts, and the void will advance a step, and a void in the information space does not stay empty; it is filled by those most ready to lie, from inside the borders and outside them. A state that fears for its internal front from rumour wars has, with its own hand, stripped that front of its most precise weapons.<\/p>\n

In the language the profession understands, this week offered a new working definition of false news: it is news that was checked outside the competent authorities. And in the language people understand: just believe us.<\/p>\n

\n

I am a journalist who has practised the profession for years, and who knows that every line he publishes today reaches the reader accompanied by a single question: who guarantees me that this is true? The six detainees were part of the answer. That is why it is not within my power, nor within the power of any journalist who respects his profession, to do anything but stand where the Journalists Syndicate stood and demand the immediate disclosure of where the six colleagues are being held, and the release of all of them.<\/p>\n

And I address the Public Prosecution, from my professional position and nothing more, with a question whose answer I commit before readers to publishing in full if it arrives: in which legal text does the crime of matching the news with the document lie?<\/p>\n

And until the answer arrives, the name of the platform whose team was arrested will remain the truest advice this week leaves to every Egyptian who opens their phone to a news item: Matsda2sh, don’t believe it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In less than twenty-four hours, the Egyptian authorities arrested the entire team of the “Matsda2sh” platform. Six journalists whose only job is to place the news item next to the document and tell people: this is true and this is false.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":16456,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[411],"tags":[17848,17852,17844,17849,17847,17845,17851,17846,17843,17850],"kateb":[688],"class_list":["post-16461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-op-ed-en","tag-dia-rashwan-media-reform","tag-egypt-criminal-procedure-code-2026","tag-egypt-fact-checkers-detained","tag-egypt-fake-news-law","tag-egypt-journalists-syndicate","tag-egypt-press-freedom-2026","tag-egyptian-initiative-personal-rights","tag-egyptian-journalists-arrested","tag-matsda2sh-egypt-arrested","tag-online-journalists-egypt","kateb-ahmed-gamal-ziada"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/\u0645\u062a\u0635\u062f\u0642\u0634.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16461"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23891,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16461\/revisions\/23891"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16461"},{"taxonomy":"kateb","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/kateb?post=16461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}