The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) calls on the Ministry of Interior and the Public Prosecution to cease the judicial pursuit of online content creators by levelling vague, morally and socially biased charges such as “violating Egyptian family values” against them. This comes as part of an aggressive security campaign within a broader effort that seems to be legally selective and inchoate to criminalise online content, which began in 2020 and continues to this day.

In recent days, Ministry of Interior forces have arrested at least seven  TikTok content creators with a large followership, including a girl under the age of eighteen. Whatever limited official information available indicates that the prosecution is charging them with morally framed accusations, including “violating Egyptian family values.” This followed intense online campaigns calling for the arrest of a group of content creators—particularly women—who all seem to share modest social backgrounds and who have succeeded in gaining income and fame through their online content. A week earlier, the Public Prosecution received several complaints filed by multiple lawyers against them and others, including one complaint signed by 32 lawyers against ten content creators, eight of whom are women.

Last July, social media was abuzz with allegations made by a TikTok user about the existence of an international organ trafficking ring, allegedly led by female TikTok users. Although these allegations lacked any evidence, they created a wave of security and moral panic against the named women and others.

The panic following these claims had been set in motion years earlier by the Public Prosecution’s rhetoric, which consistently demonised TikTok users—particularly women from modest (middle-income and lower-middle income) socio-economic backgrounds that actually mirror the social status of the majority of Egyptians. The Ministry of Interior not only arrested the content creator who initiated the organ trafficking claim—whom the prosecution remanded in detention for 15 days pending investigation on charges including spreading false news—but also fuelled public outrage and fear directed towards TikTok content creators at large, prompting a wave of further arrests.

In parallel, MP Ahmed Badawi, Chair of the Telecommunications Committee in the House of Representatives, announced that before the end of the last parliamentary session, several meetings had been held with TikTok representatives in Egypt with the aim of “improving published content.” He affirmed Egypt’s support for investment in technology, while at the same time hinting at the possibility of blocking the platform and applying the Cybercrime Law to it. This is reminiscent of 2020 meetings between Egyptian government officials and representatives of Bigo, attended by the Chinese ambassador in Cairo, which were similarly preceded by a crackdown on online female content creators.

These consecutive arrests represent the peak of a pattern that has persisted for the past five years: increasing hostility of the legal and security institutions of the state towards TikTok content creators based on classist, gender-biased, moralistic, and legally undefined standards. In April 2020, the Ministry of Interior arrested TikTok user Haneen Hossam, and the official Public Prosecution Facebook page accused her of participating in an international human trafficking ring. From that day on, a relentless campaign has targeted digital content and online personal expression, casually criminalising them under charges of “violating any of the family principles or values in Egyptian society” pursuant to Article 25 of Law No. 175 of 2018 on Cybercrime. This article has become one of the key tools for criminalising expression in Egypt and a new instrument of state legal repression of free speech. The slogan “Let’s Clean It Up,” which in 2020 accompanied calls to prosecute female content creators, has re-emerged to support the latest wave of mass arrests. Each time there was an uptick in this campaign, it has been marked by moral and security panic—whether over alleged human trafficking or organ trafficking.

Over the past five years, more than 151 individuals have faced charges of violating Egyptian family values in at least 109 different cases—cases in which EIPR either provided legal aid or advice, or reviewed and monitored the documents and documented the patterns. These numbers do not necessarily reflect the full scale of the campaign, which is believed to be much broader.

What began as a campaign targeting female internet users—particularly on TikTok—has since expanded to include people with religious opinions that deviate from the official interpretations of Muslim and Christian institutions; male internet users, either because of their homosexuality or perceived homosexuality, or for other varied reasons; including children; and other individuals based on private content that was never shared publicly. Article 25 of the Cybercrime Law, with its “family values” clause, has thus been increasingly used against citizens in general, beyond the originally targeted groups.

This ongoing wave of prosecutions has also opened the floodgates for individuals to police online content themselves, filing complaints against one another over material that does not constitute any crime. Contributing to this is the Public Prosecution’s social media messaging, particularly on Facebook since 2020, which has encouraged citizens to “help maintain public morals” by reporting content they deem unacceptable. This seems to have encouraged the activities of a group of lawyers who have been focusing their efforts on female—and a few male—content creators, filing persistent complaints against them. The state fuels these practices by responding to them, sending a clear message that it will act on some people’s wishes to restrict and criminalise others’ freedom of expression, even where no crime exists and without clear boundaries and definitions of what constitutes a crime and what does not.

The role of “family values” as a new legal weapon in Egyptian legislation cannot be understood without considering the political, social, and legal context of the past decade, which has seen the passage of multiple legislative defects—whether deliberate or due to limited legislative capabilities—where the legislation fails to define criminal acts precisely, instead using vague phrases such as “family values,” or provisions like those in Law No. 128 of 2014 - which notoriously became known as the law criminalising “ any other things.” The judiciary routinely issues first-instance misdemeanour verdicts using pre-drafted templates, merely filling in the defendant’s name and case number, while showing unprecedented tolerance for violations of defendants’ procedural rights from the very outset.

These accusations and practices can easily be seen as part of the normalisation of the criminalisation of political speech first, and then of all other forms of expression, including a clear hostility towards the internet as one of the few remaining spaces for Egyptians to express themselves—even non-politically. More importantly, these practices should be viewed within the state’s broader project of social control and moulding Egyptians’ appearance, opinions, and behaviour, rejecting any sign of social diversity. While the state routinely employs the language of “building the Egyptian citizen” as a national project supposedly ensuring a minimum level of social rights—without actually guaranteeing them or providing for them—it simultaneously asserts, through its officials, that it seeks to “build the Egyptian citizen” with observable specifications: a person of a certain body type and weight, holding specific preferences and beliefs, and adhering to uniform personal and moral behaviour. The class-based nature of this moulding is unmistakable. When the Public Prosecution claims it has created a new role for itself in defending what it calls “social national security,” it primarily refers to the behaviour, appearance, and personal expression of individuals from Egypt’s largest socio-economic classes, focusing particularly on controlling the conduct of women from middle and lower-income backgrounds so that they conform to an imagined moral standard of the Egyptian middle class. The prosecution never applies the same standards to very similar behaviour or expression - which we assert is not criminal and should not be the subject of state interest in the first place - from more affluent classes. 

The role of “family values” cannot be separated from the current regime’s project to discipline individuals who deviate from the morals it dictates for its citizens—even in their private lives and self-expression. This conservative moral and family-centred agenda is part of the state’s larger project to monopolise the entire public sphere and suppress any discourse or expression that might challenge its dominance—a pattern EIPR has termed “moral authoritarianism.”

In May, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights published a study titled Virtual Freedom: Towards Ending the Repression of Freedom of Expression in the Cybercrime Law, offering a detailed analysis of the violations it has documented and monitored in numerous cases involving clear infringements on citizens’ freedoms using the fundamentally flawed Cybercrime Law, which we hold violates both the Egyptian Constitution and established legal doctrine, as well as international human rights law.