Egypt rounds up teenaged TikTokkers in crackdown on social media

Egyptian authorities have been rounding up teenage TikTokkers with millions of followers, detaining dozens in recent weeks on accusations ranging from violating family values to laundering money.

Police have announced dozens of arrests, and prosecutors say they are investigating at least 10 cases of alleged unlawful financial gains. They have imposed travel bans and asset freezes and confiscated devices.

Critics say the escalation fits into a broader effort by the state to police speech and codify conduct, in a country where social media has long served as one of the few alternatives to traditional media largely controlled by the state.

Many of those who have been detained were only small children when activists used Facebook to mobilise the 2011 protests that toppled long-serving president Hosni Mubarak.

Lawyers say indecency laws are vague. The authorities can go through a TikToker's entire back catalogue of posts, and if they find even a single post they consider indecent, they can declare influencers' income illegal and charge them with financial crimes over their earnings.

Mariam Ayman, a 19-year-old who has gathered 9.4 million followers posting videos since she was a schoolgirl under the name Suzy El Ordonia, has been jailed since August 2. She faces charges of distributing indecent content and laundering 15 million pounds ($300,000).

The Interior Ministry said she was arrested after the authorities received complaints about her posts. In her final video, posted the day before her arrest, she seemed aware that she was facing a threat.

"Egyptians don't get arrested just because they appear on TikTok," she said.

She acknowledged that in previous videos she may have "agitated, cursed, or told a bad joke" but said this was meant to vent frustration, and "not meant to teach the younger generation to follow suit".

Her lawyer, Marawan al-Gindy, declined to comment directly on her case, but said that in general indecency laws were being applied arbitrarily.

"There is a law that criminalises indecent acts, but what we need is consistent application and defined rules, not just for TikTok, for all platforms," he said.

The path to TikTok fame in Egypt, as elsewhere, can seem random. Suzy, like millions of other teens, had a habit of posting videos of her daily life and morning makeup routine.

A few years ago, one of her livestreams went viral when she replied to a comment from her father, a bus conductor, with a rhyming Arabic quip that soon swept the country as a catchphrase.

She racked up millions of followers, who tuned in to see her share a meal with friends or dance to street musicians in Turkey. Thirty-one million people watched her have a photo shoot with her boyfriend. Her sister, who has a mental disability, appeared in some videos, helping lift social stigma around disability.

But even such generally upbeat videos with no overt political content can imply criticism of the hardships of daily life.

In an interview with a podcaster recorded before her arrest, Suzy said that if she had 10 million Egyptian pounds, she would spend half of it to move her family to a better home, help her parents start a shop and enrol her sister in a private school to receive better care.

Shortly after that appearance, her interviewer, podcaster Mohamed Abdel Aaty, was also arrested.

The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) earlier this month urged the Interior Ministry and the public prosecution to halt "an aggressive security campaign" based on what morality provisions it described as vague.

The prosecutions rely on a broadly worded article of a 2018 cybercrime law that criminalises infringing on "any of the principles or family values in Egyptian society", said EIPR lawyer Lobna Darwish.

The broad standard means TikTokkers have been arrested for content that would not be out of place on mainstream TV, Darwish said.

The rights organisation has tracked at least 151 people charged under the article across more than 109 cases in the past five years, a tally it says is probably an undercount.

As the campaign has escalated, prosecutors have encouraged citizens to report objectionable content. The Interior Ministry itself runs an account on TikTok which has posted comments on hundreds of videos urging creators to abide by morals.

TikTokkers lately have found themselves inundated with comments accusing them of immorality. Some people calling for arrests have even circulated a claim, without evidence, that influencers were running an organ trafficking network.

Darwish said the campaign has widened from targeting female TikTok users to including people with dissenting religious views or LGBT Egyptians. Some people had been investigated over private content that had not been publicly shared but had leaked from their phones, she said.

The State Information Service did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

TikTok says it enforces its own community guidelines through automation and human moderation. In its latest quarterly report, it said it had removed over 2.9 million videos from Egypt. TikTok representatives declined to answer Reuters' request for comment.

Social media adviser Ramy Abdel Aziz said TikTok creators in Egypt can earn around $1.20 per thousand views of a video, around a tenth of what creators can earn in the United States but still potentially a windfall in a low-wage country.

"Social media can be a huge source of income, but it would still require a long time to generate it especially if the [income] is made in legitimate ways," Abdel Aziz said.

Financial analyst and anti-money-laundering expert Tamer Abdul Aziz said that if the state's real concern was illegal financial flows, it should be looking at companies, not content creators.

"If there's a crime, you look at the owner or the financial flows, not the performers," he added.