A Six-Word Clause, 626 Defendants
Article 25 of Egypt's Law No. 175 of 2018 — the Anti-Cyber and Information Technology Crimes law, ratified by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi on August 14, 2018 and in force the next day — criminalizes infringing on "any family principle or value of Egyptian society." The penalty is a minimum of six months in prison and a fine of EGP 50,000 to 100,000 (roughly $1,000–$2,000). The law does not define what a family value is. It never has.
That vagueness has now produced a documented record. The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), one of the country's oldest human rights organizations, published updated monitoring this month showing at least 545 separate prosecutions against no fewer than 626 people since 2020 — 392 women and 234 men — across at least 17 governorates. The cases are concentrated in the Public Prosecution's Monitoring and Follow-up Unit, created that same year specifically to process this kind of complaint, and EIPR says the pace has risen sharply since the summer of 2025, not fallen off as the novelty of TikTok prosecutions might have suggested.
From Dance Videos to Terrorism Charges
The pattern started narrowly and has widened. Early cases targeted young, often low-income women posting dance or lifestyle content: Hanin Hossam and Mawada al-Adham, among the first wave of TikTok creators prosecuted in 2020, received three- and six-year sentences respectively, frequently under human-trafficking theories layered on top of the morality charge. By August 2025, according to Al-Monitor's reporting, the campaign had moved to creators like Mariam Ayman ("Suzy El Ordonia"), arrested on indecency and money-laundering charges covering 15 million Egyptian pounds — prosecutors used her entire posting history to declare her income illegal. Research from the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression (AFTE) documents the charge metastasizing further still, into terrorism allegations: four young men promoting a costume competition online were charged with joining a terrorist group and spreading false news. AFTE also notes the user base being policed has grown enormously — Egypt's TikTok audience expanded from roughly 15–18 million in 2021 to about 41.3 million by 2025 — which tracks with a state apparatus treating platform reach itself as the problem.
The Case the Government Would Make
It's worth taking Cairo's stated rationale seriously rather than dismissing it outright. Governments everywhere are grappling with real harms on short-video platforms — exploitative content aimed at minors, coordinated disinformation, and scams that ride on influencer credibility. Egypt's concern about content undermining confidence in its economy, for instance, isn't manufactured from nothing: plenty of jurisdictions now regulate market-moving disinformation. A state asking how to keep pace with a platform that quadrupled its user base in four years is not, on its face, acting in bad faith.
But Article 25 was never built for that problem, and the enforcement record shows it. A clause with no statutory definition, enforced primarily against young women from poor backgrounds for clothing, dancing, or tone of voice, is not a child-safety or anti-fraud regime — it is a morals law operating through a cybercrime statute, with the scale and selectivity to prove it. EIPR's count of 626 people is explicitly a floor, built from case files, court judgments, Interior Ministry and prosecution statements, and press coverage that the organization could access — the real number is almost certainly higher. The Interior Ministry runs a TikTok account that comments on videos urging creators to adjust their "morals," and prosecutors actively solicit citizen complaints, which means the law's reach is bounded less by statute than by whoever decides to report a stranger's video.
The PM's New Push Threatens to Formalize the Problem
On July 29, 2026, Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly announced that the government is preparing "executive frameworks to confront the adverse risks of social media," explicitly invoking protection of "public morals," "customs and traditions," and "the reputation of individuals and families" — the same undefined categories that have driven five years of prosecutions. The first announced track is legislative: reviewing existing laws, raising fines, and speeding up legal proceedings. EIPR's warning, paired with its new case count, is precise: a government moving to formalize "regulation" of social media under vocabulary indistinguishable from Article 25's morality clause is not closing the gap the vagueness created — it is institutionalizing it, potentially with harsher penalties and faster courts attached.
What Proportionate Would Look Like
Egypt doesn't need to choose between an ungoverned platform and a morality dragnet. Narrowly drawn child-safety and financial-fraud provisions, enforced with judicial — not purely prosecutorial — oversight, and an actual statutory definition of prohibited content would address the harms the PM cites without requiring a "family values" standard that a police social-media account can apply by comment section. Speeding up proceedings under the existing framework, as Madbouly proposes, makes the problem worse, not better: faster courts applied to an undefined offense mean faster convictions of whoever gets reported next.