PM Statements on “Regulating” Social Media Threaten Expanded Surveillance and Criminalization
Position Paper
Lobna Darwish, Advocacy Director at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights
On 29 July, Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouli announced that the government was preparing “executive frameworks to confront the adverse risks of social media.” According to the official statement, it would draw on approaches adopted in other countries to devise regulatory measures to protect “social peace and security,” “public morals,” “customs and traditions,” and “the reputation of individuals and families.”
The announcement outlined two main courses of action. The first is legislative: reviewing existing laws, raising existing fines, and speeding up legal proceedings. The second is institutional: activating a unit that has already been established within the National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA) to monitor “violations,” alongside coordination among the relevant authorities and public-awareness campaigns.
At this legislative and political juncture, both courses of action are alarming. The legislative review is likely to introduce new offences based on vague terms such as “Egyptian customs and traditions,” “societal values,” and “social peace,” or increase the penalties attached to existing provisions that restrict freedom of expression. The institutional track, meanwhile, could turn the new -previously undisclosed- unit into a permanent apparatus that monitors content, classifies accounts, collects data, and refers individuals to investigative authorities, with no published standards, judicial warrant, independent oversight, or legal basis.
This announcement must be understood in light of how the charge of “violating the values and principles of the Egyptian family” has been applied in Egypt. Since the current regime introduced the offence of “violating Egyptian family values” to the Egyptian legal system for the first time in 2018, the charge has been used systematically and on a wide scale by security and judicial authorities against content published online. The campaign began by targeting a group of young women content creators, then expanded to target hundreds of people and many forms of expression, digital work, and content about daily life.
This record shows how vague statutory language can underpin a systematic pattern of enforcement and, over time, become yet another tool in the state’s arsenal for criminalizing freedom of expression. The government’s announcement should therefore be understood as another step toward entrenching this approach through new criminal provisions and penalties, supported by an administrative structure with greater capacity to monitor and punish.
The Political Project of Criminalizing Non-Political Content
The expansion from prosecuting journalists, political opponents, and human rights defenders to arresting entertainment content creators is no less political. Using state bodies and criminal law to dictate the dress code, voices, accents, occupations, and forms of femininity and masculinity deemed acceptable for most Egyptian women and men reflects a political vision of society and the state’s role within it. It also complements the state’s attempts to dictate how public employees should look and how much they should weigh, as seen when thousands of teachers were excluded from appointment in the 30,000-teacher competition on the basis of discriminatory and unlawful criteria in Military Academy tests, including weight. The same logic is evident in the campaign against freedom of religion or belief and the right to express it, which has escalated since mid-2025.
The “family values” prosecutions are part of a broader, long-running evisceration of Egypt’s public sphere. It began with restrictions on independent association and organized political action; as opportunities for organizing dwindled, the crackdown expanded to encompass political speech and expression. It also extended into the digital sphere. Journalists, researchers, human rights defenders, and ordinary citizens have faced charges - including spreading false news, misusing social media, joining or financing a terrorist group- simply for expressing views on public affairs or seeking to organize to exercise their constitutional rights.
Since 2020, the scope of criminalization has expanded to non-political content: dancing, lip syncing, comedy, clothing, accents, ways of speaking and moving before a camera, providing tattoo or beauty services, hosting talk shows, sharing details of daily life, and earning an income through digital platforms - all in the name of protecting “Egyptian family values.”
As part of the same political trajectory, state intervention has expanded from regulating citizens’ relationship with the state to regulating their appearance, voice, work, self-presentation in public, and what content they are permitted to show. After restrictions on organizing, protest, journalism, and independent websites, social media platforms became one of the few remaining spaces where individuals could reach an audience without relying exclusively on traditional media owned by, affiliated with, or close to state institutions. Subjecting these platforms to new criminal provisions and a permanent surveillance structure is therefore not simply a matter of bureaucratic regulation. It is another—and perhaps the last—stage in the destruction of the public sphere.
Six Years of Prosecution: The Record
EIPR’s report “Whose Values? Online Morality Policing in the Name of ‘Egyptian Family Values’” documented repeated campaigns to criminalize online freedom of expression through the charge of “violating Egyptian family values.” Updated monitoring conducted through the end of July 2026 identified at least 545 separate cases or incidents of prosecution involving no fewer than 626 people since 2020- 392 women and 234 men - across at least 17 governorates.
These figures are not comprehensive. They cover only cases documented through EIPR legal assistance, case files and court judgments, statements by the Public Prosecution and Ministry of Interior, or press coverage. Even so, they reveal a systematic practice involving law-enforcement bodies and the prosecution – particularly through the latter’s Monitoring and Follow-up Unit created in 2020 - as well as the courts, the media, and private citizen complainants. They also show a sharp rise in prosecutions since the summer of 2025 and their continuation throughout 2026, suggesting that they have become established state policy.
Disciplining Society
The expansion of “family values” prosecutions did not become official policy through a single announced decision. It gradually took shape through the accumulation of legal interpretations, procedures, and initiatives by different official bodies. The Public Prosecution began the campaign by targeting a group that could easily be isolated, vilified, and made targets of moral panic: young women content creators, many from poor or low-income backgrounds, targeted because of their appearance, manner of expression, or attempts to monetize their content online. Throughout the campaign, charges such as “human trafficking” and “money laundering” were used to fuel panic and deter solidarity.
This outrage was used to normalize arrest, detention, and smear campaigns, while official statements repeatedly invoked phrases such as “family values,” “protecting the innocence of the youth,” and “increasing viewership and making profits.” The Ministry of Interior then joined the campaign by regularly announcing arrests and publishing photographs of those arrested and of seized items, which in many cases consisted only of mobile phones and money found at the place of arrest. Over time, the prosecutions spread to other forms of content and to men whose appearance, expression, or work did not conform to traditional gender roles.
Tracing this trajectory reveals a clear gender and class bias. It punishes departures from imposed ideals of femininity and masculinity, and targets conduct that does not attract the same prosecution when it appears in commercial media or among higher-income people online- and that, in many cases, does not attract legal scrutiny offline. At a time of scarce employment opportunities, earning through digital platforms is recast as inherently suspect when it allows people from poor or disadvantaged backgrounds to gain visibility, earn an income, or achieve social mobility.
The prosecutions have thus become a tool for regulating behaviour and deciding who may be visible and who may earn a living online, rather than a means of addressing conduct that causes identifiable harm to others. Their effects extend beyond those arrested to users at large: prosecuting someone for their clothes, language, or movements sends a message to people like them about the conduct they should avoid. This disciplinary function is completed by publishing images of those arrested, their possessions, and their work tools before any final judgment—and even before they are referred to the prosecution or questioned. Public shaming therefore becomes a practical, pretrial punishment whose effects do not disappear if a case is closed or ends in acquittal. The lack of clarity about what may constitute an offence further intensifies this chilling effect.
Vague Offences and Harsher Penalties
The record of “family values” prosecutions shows that vague provisions do not remain confined to the statute book; enforcement steadily expands their reach. When the law fails to define the criminalized act and the resulting harm precisely, the definition of a violation is left to law-enforcement and investigative authorities and to media campaigns. This opens the door to selective and discriminatory enforcement based on a person’s identity, class, and gender.
The central lesson of the past several years of these prosecutions is that criminal law should address a specific act that has caused demonstrable harm to a person or a protected interest. It must not become a tool for policing expression or imposing an official conception of what constitutes acceptable content and values. Before proposing any amendment, the government must identify precisely the harm that existing laws cannot address and explain why it cannot be dealt with through less restrictive means.
“Undermining National Economy” VS Freedom to Voice Economic Hardship
The Prime Minister’s statement said that “lies” and “rumours” on social media could undermine “the growth of the national economy.” This language is alarming when read alongside Article 34 of the Cybercrime Law, which increases the penalty for any offence under the law to imprisonment for 3 to 15 years when the defendant is alleged to have intended to harm the country’s “economic standing,” without clearly defining that harm. The danger lies in using this language to expand criminalization in an area that, by its nature, requires the free circulation of information, analysis, and opinion and directly affects citizens’ lives. Discussion of debt, inflation, shortages of goods, deteriorating wages or public services, and criticism of economic policies may contradict the official narrative or affect the public’s assessment of state performance, but it does not in itself constitute criminal harm. Actual damage to the economy must not be conflated with damage to the government’s image or its account of the economic situation. By the same logic, any discussion of the absence of social justice could be construed as a threat to “social peace.”
International law does not permit the use of criminal laws, financial penalties, or custodial sentences against a person for expressing a view described as “false” or inaccurate unless it constitutes direct incitement to violence or causes concrete harm to the safety or health of others. The information in question may be disputed, based on an economic assessment or incomplete data where access to information is limited, or it may simply reflect a view at odds with official figures. Views - even mistaken ones - should be met with counterargument, greater disclosure and access to data, and measures enabling journalists, researchers, and citizens to verify claims and scrutinize the evidence, not with criminal law used to protect the “image of the economy.”
Criminal intent should not be inferred from the intensity or reach of criticism, or from its divergence from the official narrative. This matters especially because charges of publishing false news have, in recent years, been used as a principal legal weapon against freedom of expression and political criticism, and even against purely personal expression that contains no factual claim capable of being true or false.
The record of enforcing vague provisions raises legitimate concern that the phrase “undermining the national economy” could make its way from political rhetoric into new criminal provisions or be used to broaden the application of Article 34 of the Cybercrime Law. This concern is not theoretical. In reality, dozens of citizens have already been arrested on charges such as publishing false news or assisting a terrorist group in achieving its aims simply because they used their personal social media accounts to voice complaints about the rising cost of living amid an unprecedented deterioration in the economic conditions of most Egyptians, a decline that has continued for at least a decade.
Criminalize the Harm, Not the Medium
A difference must be drawn between confronting crimes committed through technology and treating the use of technology as a separate basis for criminal liability. Threats, extortion, harassment, libel, defamation, invasion of privacy, and publishing personal images without consent are harmful regardless of the medium used. Deepfakes, identity theft, and image manipulation can likewise cause direct harm to people’s lives and safety. Treating the internet itself as the source of risk or harm demonizes the medium instead of identifying the harm. The Prime Minister’s statement follows earlier remarks about protecting children online. Protecting children from exploitation, extortion, harassment, and privacy violations requires confronting specific measures and developing effective safeguards. It does not justify treating the entire digital sphere as a source of danger, using child protection as a pretext to strip children of their other rights, or monitoring and criminalizing adults’ expression.
As the EIPR report “Anti-Technology” explained, an offence should be defined by the violation of a right, not by the method used to commit it. The internet may increase the scale of harm or the speed of its dissemination, requiring appropriate rules for collecting evidence, preserving data, removing unlawful content, and compensating victims. But it does not justify turning words, clothing, or movements that are not criminalized offline into crimes merely because they are posted online, or imposing an additional penalty for the use of an online account. The failure to prevent and punish most forms of digital abuse does not stem from an absence of legal provisions. It stems from the difficulty of obtaining effective protection, slow responses, weak capacity to investigate, preserve evidence, and trace accounts, and limited understanding of the particular characteristics of digital violence and abuse. The police, prosecution, and judiciary should therefore strengthen their capacity to handle digital evidence, deepfakes, and identity theft and respond seriously and swiftly to victims’ reports, particularly those of women, children, and groups most vulnerable to digital violence, while respecting privacy and protecting victims, their data, and the rights of defence.
Creating new offences to prosecute “immoral content,” or monitoring the public at large in search of it, does not protect victims of abuse. Instead, it diverts institutional resources toward prosecuting expression. What is needed is a more effective response to victims’ reports, including measures for protection, investigation, and accountability, rather than using such harm to institutionalize morality policing and the systematic surveillance of citizens.
The Government ‘Responds’ to Its Own Media
The Prime Minister’s statement said that the government had acted in response to a press and media campaign warning of the dangers of social media. Presenting the campaign as an independent demand from an independent press, however, disregards the reality of Egypt’s media landscape after years of concentrating media ownership in the hands of state-affiliated bodies, censoring content, blocking independent websites, and prosecuting journalists for their work. The reference to the media campaign therefore appears to be part of a self-reinforcing cycle of manufactured public panic: state-affiliated outlets launch a moral-panic campaign, which the government then cites as a public demand to justify new offences, penalties, and surveillance powers.
The Threat of a New Surveillance Body
Alongside the proposed legislative changes, the communications minister’s announcement that a unit has already been established within the NTRA to monitor “violations” raises questions about the legal basis for its creation, the limits of its mandate, how a violation is defined, the standards for referring content to investigative authorities, and the body responsible for overseeing its work. Monitoring may include collecting users’ names, photographs, accounts, and patterns of activity, and could be used to infer political, social, or security-related information about them. Yet the statement did not explain whether the unit is subject to the Personal Data Protection Law or even to the Telecommunications Regulation Law that established the NTRA, or whether it will operate within those laws’ broad exemptions for data processed in implementation of the law or connected to investigations and national security bodies. Nor did the statement specify the purposes of data collection, retention periods, the bodies given access to the data, or individuals’ rights to know about it, correct it, object to its processing, or request its deletion. It also failed to state whether automated tools or AI systems would be used for surveillance and classification, or whether staff would be assigned to track content.
The unit’s work cannot be separated from the proposed legislative amendments. The law determines what it may monitor, while the unit gives those provisions the machinery for daily enforcement and continual expansion. It must not be treated as a purely bureaucratic measure requiring no legislative basis. The need for the unit, and the danger it poses to freedom of expression and people’s privacy, must first be assessed. At present, it is a body operating without any published law that defines its mandate, the types of data it collects, safeguards governing the use, security, and deletion of that data, or mechanisms for oversight and appeal.
Conclusion
The record of the past six years shows what happens when a vague moral concept becomes the basis for sustained prosecution. Prosecutions expanded from targeting women content creators to encompassing a broad range of expression and digital work, leading to arrests, detention, investigations, public smear campaigns, and the loss of livelihoods, with stark class and gender biases. After the documentation of investigation and criminal trials involving hundreds of people, the dangers of further expansion are no longer hypothetical. The record shows that an ambiguous provision, applied arbitrarily and combined with overlapping charges and repeated prosecutions, can transform an exception into an entrenched policy that sends people to prison for years even though they have committed no crime and caused no harm.
It is therefore difficult to read the Prime Minister’s latest statements as anything other than an expression of the state’s hostility towards any attempt by Egyptians to voice their views and concerns online, after every other civic space for the peaceful and lawful expression of opinion has been destroyed. For the state, only total silence will do.
For further reading, see the following EIPR reports:
Whose Values? Online morality policing in the name of “Egyptian family values”
