{"id":17836,"date":"2026-10-08T15:02:38","date_gmt":"2026-10-08T13:02:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/?p=17836"},"modified":"2026-10-08T15:05:45","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T13:05:45","slug":"electronic-committees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/electronic-committees\/","title":{"rendered":"Manufacturing False Consensus in Egypt: \u201cElectronic Committees\u201d from Mubarak\u2019s Accounts to Marketing Companies"},"content":{"rendered":"

On 1 October, the Ministry of Interior, in its statement<\/a>, described the six journalists of the Matsda2sh platform as a \u201cmedia committee\u201d affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, and on 7 October the Public Prosecution said<\/a> that one of the defendants \u201cadmitted during the investigations to joining, together with the arrested defendants and others, the Brotherhood\u2019s media committee.\u201d 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\u2019s 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 \u201celectronic committees\u201d as a mutual accusation rather than a visible network.<\/p>\n

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One Week, One Narrative<\/h2>\n

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<\/a> the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, which is defending them. The Interior Ministry\u2019s statement was issued about forty-eight hours later, describing the page as \u201cunlicensed and run from abroad\u201d and among the group\u2019s \u201cmedia committees,\u201d and stating that one of the six is a registered member of the Journalists\u2019 Syndicate. Over the following hours, as Zawia3 documented<\/a> 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\u2019s founder, Abdelrahman Mansour, the name of a company in New York, and a mechanism of financial transfers, all attributed to unnamed \u201csources.\u201d 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\u2019s 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<\/a> what Mada Masr published.<\/p>\n

In the first hour of 2 October, the Al-Ahram portal published an item<\/a> saying that the security services had arrested six of those running the page, \u201camong them Abdelrahman Mansour, a registered member of the Journalists\u2019 Syndicate,\u201d even though the Interior Ministry\u2019s statement itself had described Mansour as \u201cthe fugitive abroad,\u201d and built the item on an old clip of the late Brotherhood leader Essam Al-Erian to say that its circulation constitutes \u201ca practical response\u201d to those who said Mansour\u2019s 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<\/a> 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 \u201cconfessions,\u201d as the Telegraph Misr website noted<\/a>, 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<\/a>, which attributed to \u201cone of those running Matsda2sh\u201d that Qadri\u2019s posts reveal his affiliation, to EgyIn<\/a>, which described him in its headline as \u201cthe Brotherhood member.\u201d On the same day, the Ministry of Interior vowed<\/a> to take legal measures against \u201cpromoters of the allegations\u201d on pages it said were affiliated with the Brotherhood.<\/p>\n

Then came what the journalists themselves said when they finally appeared before the prosecution. The Egyptian Initiative said<\/a>, 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 \u201cconfessions\u201d 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 \u201cthat they were free of injuries and that there were no signs indicating the use of violence against them,\u201d that the defendants had admitted receiving periodic sums in dollars from a company owned by a fugitive member abroad, and that the page is \u201cone of the group\u2019s media platforms.\u201d The Initiative responded, according to<\/a> Mada Masr, that the statement \u201cconferred an untrue criminal character on legitimate acts.\u201d 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\u2019s statement, by way of screens, websites and posts that reproduced it every day.<\/p>\n