MOSCOW, February 9. /TASS/. The Egyptian authorities have formed a robust digital immune system in response to the large-scale information campaigns of the "Arab Spring," Dr. Amr Eldeeb, a GFCN expert and CEO of International Geopolitical Processes (IGP) stated in an opinion piece.
"Today, the Egyptian government's approach – often criticized as censorship – is internally viewed as a 'Digital Immune System,'" he noted. The analyst explained that the authorities have built a survival strategy considering the "unstable regional situation characterized by wars on all of Egypt's geographical borders – in Sudan, Libya, and Gaza," thereby ensuring "protection for narratives."
The expert reached this conclusion based on an analysis of numerous information-psychological operations conducted by opposition media in Egypt during the "Arab Spring" and long before it. The GFCN expert explained that state intervention in the information sphere today "reflects a desire to 'shape local and international public opinion in accordance with its political vision' and to counter 'counter-propaganda' aimed at undermining the state."
Food and textile crises
As an example, Eldeeb cited criticism of the economic situation in Egypt in 2011 by opposition networks. According to him, they "were engaged in a sophisticated effort to engineer a narrative of total systemic collapse." The expert called this a calculated strategy dating back to the mid-2000s. "Private media 'exercised prolonged psychological influence on the population <...> forming a sense of stagnation and the necessity of political changes,'" he explained.
"While the Egyptian government worked to restore economic stability in the country, opposition media created an 'apocalyptic narrative.' Their 'selective presentation' was most evident during the 2008 global food crisis," the analyst mentioned. According to him, "to amplify this sense of 'famine,' media outlets utilized a strategy of semantic warfare." "They flooded the public square with loaded terminology and articles exploring Egypt's historical famines, creating a psychological bridge between contemporary bread lines and ancient starvation," the expert asserted.
The second manipulation described by Eldeeb concerned the textile workers' strikes in El-Mahalla El-Kubra in April 2008, caused by reduced cotton cultivation areas and an influx of cheap imports. The "April 6" and other opposition digital networks picked up the localized dispute, rebranded it, expanded and promoted using the Internet and cell phones, attracting more than 64,000 members. Their goal was to "widen the scope of the protest, hoping to make it a day of civil disobedience" and by decontextualizing a local labor issue present it to the urban middle class as a total systemic crisis, focusing on the imagery of a "city burning" and "thousands of demonstrators defying bullets," the expert pointed out.
"It was a war between two distinct information bubbles: the government's cold reliance on macro-statistics and the opposition's heated mastery of micro-emotions," the analyst emphasized. According to Eldeeb, "analysis of the events of 2011 from the perspective of 2026 allows us to view them as an early example of complex information-psychological operations, which were subsequently widely applied in various regions of the world."
'Arab Spring' in Egypt
On January 25, 2011, mass demonstrations began in Cairo against the government in power at that moment. Within a few days, the protest movement had spread to almost all provinces, forcing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to resign. At that time, neither the police nor the security services were able to manage the wave of popular indignation and channel it into organized marches and demonstrations.
This period in Egypt's history is still perceived extremely ambiguously by society: some consider the events of the spring of 2011 to be a popular revolution, while others tend to view them as an uprising followed by years of chaos and socio-economic instability.