Note: The following feature has been translated by Maria al Jarf
Introduction
Social media is one of the most important means of expressing and defending freedom in Egypt. Due to information suppression, many Egyptians, including women and communities with Gender and Sexual Diversities (GSD), have faced oppression.
While social media is a tool through which they can generate some form of resistance and assert their rights, it has recently become a nightmare for women and the GSD community. Once victims express their opinion, the space can become a place where they and their families are insulted, threatened, stigmatised and blackmailed. Sometimes it’s not the opinion, it’s just because she’s a woman — the response is always that women’s place is in the kitchen, not to be able to express any views and thoughts.
Women online
In this context, Egyptian feminist and human rights activist Shaimaa al-Banna says that she and many of her circle were attacked on social media sites following the death of queer activist Sara Hijazi: “Usually, it’s a threat of violence message…or someone tries to contact our famil[ies] to let them know that we support [GSD rights on the] Crime Speak Page — a feminist initiative supporting victims of all forms of violence.”
Shaimaa adds that while social media can be seen as a safe place for women, there is a need to develop additional safety for women and groups of women. At present, the alternatives are using more safe routes through closed groups, providing psychological and personal support groups for victims of such attacks, as well as using legal means and attempting to prosecute perpetrators.
Regarding solutions to such crises, Shaimaa says that in women’s circles, there are always solutions that intersect with cybersecurity. These groups are trying to develop alternative solutions to hold social media platforms accountable, in addition to the means available there, such as reporting activity against hateful content or reporting people who threaten or blackmail them.
But there is another dimension to the crisis. Feminists also have other issues they talk about — like Palestine. When they write flyers on this topic, they get removed. For example, Instagram removes some posts because they violate their norms. For example, the site shut down the Arabic-language ‘The sex talk’ account for posts related to sexual health — although there was similar content in English, which the site did not consider a violation of its standards.
Threats leading to murder: Naira Ashraf
The past year has seen some shocking events in Egypt: starting with threats on social media and ending with the murder of several girls. At the forefront of these events was the murder of student Naira Ashraf by a young man after she refused to marry him; the fate of Naira Ashraf became a warning for many.
In this context, Feminist Azza Suleiman, chairperson of the Egyptian Women’s Issues Foundation, and chair of the Appellate Committee of the Supreme Court, says that the real crisis is that there is no uniform law on violence against women in Egypt. Now some women’s rights organisations have formulated a bill to be sent to parliament.
The proposal covers all cases of violence, including electronic extortion, and links the law with others such as that on witness protection. The proposal was approved by MP Nadia Henry during the last session of the parliamentary assembly. During this session, the Nashwa Al-Deeb Council was passed: “We want the bill to make it to the Legislative Council, especially after four women were murdered simply for refusing to marry or hook up with someone. Some women turned to the police, who didn’t protect them… There is widespread domestic violence or violence against women in formal institutions, empowering certain men and violence against women there.”
Suleiman says that cultural and social victories have broken some social, cultural and religious taboos in society, including the ability to protect and support the gender and sexually diverse community, whether through legal, cultural or psychological support.
Rasha Azab
Earlier, fellow journalist Rasha Azab announced her referral to trial on charges of “insulting and hurling at” a director who had seven testimonies accusing him of rape and harassment. This case is the first to be charged in solidarity with survivors of rape and harassment. An Egyptian court fined Rasha Azab 10,000 Egyptian pounds for insult and slander.
In this regard, Suleiman believes that the Rasha Azab incident is an important sign that some men have gathered in closed social media groups to conduct organised attacks on organised cyberspace to defend each other and attack victims. Even groups of women on social media platforms are dreadful as they take advantage of all the legal frameworks that give them inherent male privileges to oppress women and increase incidents of violence and intimidation against them. They try to punish women who dare to claim their rights, women like Rasha Azab and others who try to support victims or expose harassers and those accused of sexually abusing women and trying to intimidate victims reporting abuse.
Trans discrimination
While women face violence and threats online, transgender people face most of the threats. Malak Al-Kashif (Egyptian feminist and queer activist) argues that when one is less privileged and more intersectional, discrimination and violence increase. Once you become transgender in Egypt, it means you’re attacked socially, institutionally and legally.
Malak Al-Kashif tells us about her experience with a cyber-attack that began in 2016 when she revealed her identity as a transgender woman in a Facebook post. It spread quickly and was widely circulated in the newspapers. It’s not the interaction and inflammatory comments that scared her, but that she’s young. Malak says: “Imagine I’m 16 and I’m reading comments wishing for death and threats of rape, beatings and kidnappings when I’m away from my family. While spending most of my time in downtown cafes, I rarely found a safe place to sleep, and sometimes someone would see me and take a picture and write words like ‘death and rape threats’ — because I decided to document the full story of my transition.”
Malak endured the threats until she wrote a post saying she had undergone gender affirming surgery. Malak said the attack was more violent than ever, and she was released after being detained in a political case during the same period. All these complex circumstances led to her attempting suicide; she was saved but these attacks continued: “I also faced a major attack against me after a video of me talking to an Arabic-speaking foreign broadcaster made me realise that my neighbors were threatening to report me to security if I didn’t leave my apartment. My friend and I were forcibly evicted from the house.”
The root cause of these attacks, Malak said, is that society, in its fragile masculine mind, feels threatened by the ubiquity of transgender people. She says: “This society sanctifies the man and grants him privilege… men commit crimes against women, get reduced sentences. When someone says I’m a woman, I’m not a man, and when they give speeches about feminism, intersectionality, and gender hierarchies, they threaten the grip of male thought on society.”
Talking about the role of social media platforms in protecting users and preventing such attacks, Malak Al-Kashif says: “Social media platforms communicate with them on a regular basis, but the communication monitors are not real people, but artificial intelligence. Therefore, due to the lack of arbitrary perception — for example, an attacker writing any sexual insult is enough to fool content review and all reports against it… in the end, [a machine] can’t tell the difference between someone who complains about something that happened to them and an instigator.”
She adds that even in human examiners of content “how can an examiner from a country other than Egypt understand that the word ‘a wheel’ is an inflammatory term and hate speech? [In normal parlance] it is an ordinary word, but its context in Egyptian culture is incendiary for the [sexually diverse] community”.
Attacked as a feminist
A A* — an Egyptian-Yemeni feminist activist who asked not to be named — says: “I’ve faced a lot of gender-based attacks over the years because I presented myself as a feminist… Hate speech often comes in the form of comments and messages, but it’s not just anonymous accounts, it extends to people I actually know… During my time organising local events in the Southern California governor’s community, the threat reached a religious level… an organised political movement threatened to blow up the youth headquarters and threatened me…”.
A A concluded by saying that women are the most affected in conflict zones because without protection, they face all the risks. Women’s issues are always at the bottom of the list, the last priority. Social media platforms put women’s lives at risk — through defamation, blackmail and smearing that lead to depression and, in some cases, suicide. “When I had my experience in Yemen, I hoped to make at least one statement, but it was not possible in the state of war.”
A A thinks things are a little better in Egypt because at least she has the opportunity to report to internet researchers; even if nothing happens to the perpetrators, accountability bodies can help determine something happened online.
Twitter scorecard
In September 2020, Amnesty International released a report stating: “Twitter continues to disappoint women through online violence and abuse, despite repeated promises that it is doing everything in its power to make the internet a safer place for women”. The group’s analysis, dubbed the ‘Twitter Scorecard’, represents an assessment of Twitter’s social media record on implementing a series of recommendations to combat abuse of women on the company’s website, as the group said in its 2018 report, titled ‘Toxic Twitter’, that the platform “addresses this issue for the first time”.
“While there has been some encouraging progress, Twitter still needs to do more to address this issue. Only one in 10 specific recommendations have been implemented, a significant improvement in processing little progress has been made in terms of transparency in abuse reporting.”
Social media responsibility
In this regard, Mostafa Elsayed Hussein, director of the Digital Security Program at the Arab Center for Legal and Community Studies (ACLSS), says that social media platforms have a responsibility to protect their users and eliminate hate speech, and the internet is an important platform if you want to allow hate speech.
There are many platforms loyal to Trump or 4chan. But Facebook and other platforms that claim to be safe places have their own posting guidelines and community rules that bypass their apps.
According to Elsayed: “The law that facilitates the operation of platforms like Facebook is Section 230 of the US law, which has many arguments, trying to change or increase it. It states that websites have the right to [delete] or [change] user posted content without legal issues. But on the other hand, a few weeks ago the EU enacted laws which would have the same approach for sites and possibly the US but if this changes, will there be any positive changes in Egypt, or will we have to create a special law forcing Facebook to obey it and Facebook will be bound by Egyptian law?”
Elsayed believes that the Council of the Wise is a positive step, but it is completely featureless and irrelevant to the problems facing Facebook. The problem with Facebook is that it doesn’t apply social norms because the Council of the Wise is a Shuri Council that listens to problems and then makes recommendations, and then Facebook complies with changing its social rules.
Let’s imagine: someone reports on such-and-such publication that targets minorities. Facebook will reply that certain conditions must be met, then AI will refuse to delete the post, but I have the right to appeal and then I will refuse to scan the post, so I have the right to complain to the board that Facebook does not respect my request. Then they meet and make a recommendation to Facebook. This is a very complicated process that many users cannot manage.
Elsayed attributes Facebook’s lack of application of social standards to the poor mechanics of its application. Instead of monitoring Arabic content, the company appointed a company to monitor content as a subcontractor for informal work. The pay is meagre, the workload high, and there’s no way to monitor everything. The crisis here is mainly because the current world economy is based on irrationality. For most businesses, the most important thing is to expand and attract more users and generate profits without concern for content monitoring or user physical safety — like the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar because of Facebook.’
In Elsayed’s view, the only solution is to rethink the regulation of our economy as a whole and at least treat the internet as a space for all opinions. Unfortunately, it is difficult to apply at present, but Facebook may lose a few million in exchange for hiring real people, not via bots capable of following millions of posts.
Hate report
The ANKH Association, which defends minority rights in West Asia and North Africa, in partnership with four other organisations, published a report in 2020 detailing examples of digital hate speech affecting the GSD community. The report is based on a questionnaire survey completed by 450 people from all sexual orientation and gender identity spectrums in the Middle East and North Africa. According to the report, 84 per cent of the perpetrators were unknown to the victim, 45 per cent were from the victim’s friends list on the platform, 43 per cent were from fake accounts, 28 per cent were real friends, 19 per cent were colleagues, and 17 per cent were family members.
In its statement, the organisation issued several recommendations for social media platforms, the most important of which are:
- Work to prevent the spread of unscientific myths about homosexuality.
- Recognize that homosexuality is not an ideology but an essential element of personal identity. Therefore, any hate speech against the GSD community is taken personally and used to encourage more repression and violence.
- Strive to align its domestic policies with international standards to combat hate speech while ensuring freedom of speech and expression and combating discrimination.
- Train MENA employees to analyze hate speech against those with diverse gender and sexual identities.
- Support alternative, positive and anti-hate speech individuals, initiatives and organizations working in this field.
In this context, we spoke to human rights activist Taha Metwally, president of the ANKH Association. He believes that shifting responsibility for such attacks to weak national laws absolves social media platform administrations from accountability to users. We need supplemental advocacy to put pressure on companies to change their policies. In the final analysis, they are investment companies that only care about profits and do not mobilise users.
“One of the most important sensitivities in Egypt is changing attitudes towards homosexuality,” Metwally adds. “There are many pages on social media platforms in the Arab world, especially in Egypt, that claim to offer transformative homosexuality therapy; we have asked these platforms more than once to shut down these pages, but they have not, and we have been told that these sites do not violate social norms, which means these platforms have different standards in Egypt than in countries like the US. [This is] an example of double standards.”
According to Metwally, there are no safe places, even closed groups, on social media platforms because companies can change their policies so easily. We could wake up one day to find that Facebook has decided to reveal our gender identities just like when it recently decided to show user feedback on stories suddenly without user permission.
So we need to understand how to use social media platforms that are less harmful to us. That said, we also cannot deny the role of social media platforms in creating new spaces to express our opinions, needs, and rights.
AA* Name withheld to protect privacy
