“I’m not political at all, and I make it a point not to be,” says Farida Salem. She chats by phone as she runs errands in Cairo on her way to football practice, where she is celebrated as one of Egypt’s most capable young female athletes.
Salem is also one of 20 Instagram influencers selected by Egypt’s information ministry to work with the government, part of its new media ambassadors programme. Ostensibly about countering the bad press Egypt receives, largely for its poor human rights record, the ministry claims the programme will “support Egypt’s image in the media through these influential youth”. Influencers, they say, will provide a way for the state to communicate directly with its large youth population.
One influencer posts a photo of his bare back as he exercises in view of the Giza pyramids. Another provides updates of her yoga classes on the beach, or posing in the splits next to the River Nile in Aswan with the tagline “when we resist we must persist”.
The attempt to revamp Egypt’s image through rose-tinted selfies jars with the perception of a country regarded as one of the world’s biggest jailers of journalists. But the state’s efforts to dominate social media with pro-government content are part of a growing trend across the Middle East. Autocratic regimes have shifted their focus from solely cracking down on free speech, to sugar-coating their propaganda, with a team of influencers masquerading as organic homegrown support.
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Social media platforms were once vital communication tools for activists across the Middle East, providing a centralised way to organise and spread news about demonstrations. Researchers found that in the two weeks before Egypt’s uprising on 25 January 2011, 32,000 Facebook groups and 14,000 Facebook pages were created. But in the years since the president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, swept to power in a military coup in 2013, “spreading false news” on social media has become a catch-all charge for jailing critics and silencing dissent.
The move to deploy patriotic social media content in a style worthy of a travel blogger is about more than well-lit shots of lattes and vistas. It projects a false narrative that undemocratic governments are listening to their citizens while masking a prolonged crackdown on free speech across the region.
In the decade since protesters flooded the streets and overthrew dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, the Middle East has become, according to Reporters Without Borders, the “world’s most dangerous region for journalists”. Meanwhile, state-sanctioned influencers function as a fig leaf for dictatorial regimes using the internet to surveil the activists and citizens who once fuelled protests.
Salem is warm and engaging. She speaks passionately about the sport she loves so much and why she wants more girls to play football. Her Instagram is a parade of shots showing her out on the pitch, helping the young girls she coaches, alongside pictures of her dog and the occasional smiling selfie. She balks at the idea her social media could be a government propaganda tool.
“I’m a football player battling stereotypical gender roles, trying to create opportunities for girls, I have no political agenda,” she says. “I applied with ideas to change the media, be part of this initiative to make the world see Egypt from a lighter perspective … to highlight the cool things.”
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None of the influencers interviewed by the Guardian said they had been offered payment or received any requests to tailor their content to government demands. Instead, they said, the government offered to boost their platform, and perhaps their follower count. In late November they appeared at an inauguration ceremony next to a smiling, besuited Osama Heikal, Egypt’s information minister, who presented them with trophies.
“We’re not seeking fame through the government,” says Hussien Elgohary, another of Egypt’s new media ambassadors, who is fond of posting grinning selfies while he strikes a pose. “But I have a feeling that my voice is being heard. We don’t know whether we’ll be paid or not, but that doesn’t matter at the moment,” he says. But, he jokes, “my followers now call me Mr Ambassador”.
Governments across the Middle East, especially the Gulf, have increasingly looked to use influencers to project an idealised public image. Saudi Arabia hired Instagram influencers to post lavish travel shots and encourage visitors shortly after the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, while the United Arab Emirates demands influencers pay the equivalent of £3,000 to register with the government in an attempt to regulate the industry.
“It’s a battle for legitimacy through narratives,” says the pro-democracy activist İyad el-Baghdadi, known for his critiques of autocrats, particularly their treatment of free speech. “If you want to get a leg up in the battle over narrative, you control the public sphere. That’s why they attack their own citizens rather than using the same technology to hack foreign leaders; it tells you who their enemies are: their own people.”
Baghdadi believes pro-government influencers can have a paradoxical impact as they “show the message and priorities” of autocratic regimes. “We get insight into what they care about from their disinformation output,” he says. “For example, we see that there’s a specific interest in intimidating women through these verified influencer accounts, where they use social shaming tactics.”
Marc Owen Jones, an assistant professor in Middle East studies and digital humanities at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha, says signs that social media platforms had a sinister side emerged during the 2011 uprising in Bahrain.
“Even in 2011 I was writing about the way vigilantes were using social media and the sock puppet accounts and social engineering that was going on,” he says.
Owen Jones says that even as activists utilised platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to organise anti-government protests, the authorities began to use them as surveillance tools against the same activists. “There was already an industry that acknowledged social media was a space that could be used for intelligence and would allow authoritarian regimes to use it as an asset.”
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In the decade since, online surveillance and control has become standard operating procedure across the Middle East, as autocrats attempt to control the internet and stifle its ability to act as a public sphere. The Citizen Lab, a Canadian anti-surveillance group, recently reported that dozens of journalists at the Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera were allegedly hacked by spyware made by Israel’s NSO Group, most likely at the behest of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Social media companies have done little to help the problem of government interference. The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently accused Facebook, Twitter and YouTube of “turning their backs on critical voices in the Middle East and north Africa”, in an open letter demanding fairer, context-specific approaches to content moderation, while preserving necessary content such as video evidence of human rights violations deleted by YouTube.
“By the time the Arab spring started, tech companies jumped on the bandwagon of the uprising and claimed this victory as theirs,” says Mohamad Najem from SMEX, a Lebanese digital rights group. But they failed in the decade since to follow up with measures that would have supported activists and dissidents, he says.
“The profit is somewhere else, and to keep their businesses growing [tech companies] needed to befriend the governments in our region. They limited their platforms from being used to challenge the political status quo.”
Meanwhile, a lack of human moderators examining Arabic-language content has frequently allowed harassment of activists and others to go unchecked. “They need more folks in our region with good values to be content moderators … specifically to protect vulnerable groups, whether women, LBGTIQ, religious minorities, etc,” Najem says.
Instead the platforms relied on algorithms to detect abusive behaviour, other researchers said, which were frequently gamed by pro-regime “electronic armies” who mass-reported posts or groups, resulting in them being automatically banned. Days or sometimes weeks passed before the accounts were reviewed and reinstated.
It was not always this way. “What I really miss from 2011 is the freedom,” says an Egyptian journalist who focuses on digital rights and technology, who also asked to remain anonymous, citing safety concerns. They reminisced about a more open internet, one not clogged with algorithms and heavy government interference.
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“When I go to my Facebook page and look at the years 2011 to 2013, I see I really didn’t censor myself that much,” they say. “There wasn’t the same self-censorship, just like on the streets.”
The internet in Egypt was long subject to restrictions, including an infamous full-scale shutdown of the internet and telecommunications in an attempt to stop the protests that overthrew the former autocrat Hosni Mubarak. But that did not stop users from employing it to organise protests and exchange ideas.
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In the past decade, Egypt has become a grim example of dragnet online surveillance. A leaked tender from 2014 showed the Egyptian interior ministry’s intent to build a sophisticated mass-monitoring system for social media, including Twitter and Facebook. That year it also began deep packet inspection, a form of precise internet filtering that Egypt now uses as a means of blocking thousands of websites, predominantly news sites.
Egyptian security forces regularly detain citizens accused of spreading “false news”. In 2018 the government passed a law to regulate social media, under which anyone with more than 5,000 followers can be accused of spreading fake news or inciting others to break the law. Last year the government jailed multiple young female TikTok influencers, accusing them of spreading “immorality”, shortly before it launched the new media ambassadors programme.
“The programme fits within the broader regime of information control,” says Joey Shea, a researcher with the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy. “So this means not just censoring content they don’t want, but turning troll accounts against content they don’t like, while also promoting narratives artificially through bots, sock puppet accounts and automated information manipulation campaigns.”
Those who long for the days of a more open internet in the Middle East fear such developments are here to stay.
“What really scares me is having these things as the new normal,” says the anonymous Egyptian journalist, pointing to the now routine practice whereby security forces stop and search citizens to scroll through their social media apps. “You can be accused of spreading false news and misusing social media – you can rot in jail for this.”
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