In Egypt, barely a month goes by without news of a TikToker or a social media influencer getting arrested. Almost all of them are young women from modest economic backgrounds. Their crime? The elusive, all-encompassing charge of offending public morality.
The main legal tool employed in these crackdowns is the 2018 law on Combating Information Technology Crimes, commonly known as the Cybercrime Law. Although the law was designed to penalize hacking, electronic fraud, cyberbullying, and similar crimes, Article 25 criminalizes violations of the “family principles and values of the Egyptian society” without defining what those principles and values are. Nonetheless, authorities use this provision to prosecute content creators.
Mawada Al Adham’s case is one infamous example of the law’s application. TikToker Mawada, now 28 years old, was only 22 when proceedings against her began in 2020, alongside another prominent TikToker, 20-year-old Haneen Hossam. Mawada’s TikTok videos featured her dancing, lip-syncing, singing, and creating other forms of entertaining content.
What could Mawada have possibly done to warrant spending her twenties behind bars?
She was sentenced to six years in prison on charges of violating family values, human trafficking, and exploiting girls for financial gain through video-sharing apps. According to her lawyer, the prosecution did not submit any evidence that Mawada had engaged in trafficking or exploitation, but she still received the six-year prison sentence, in addition to a one-year sentence in 2026 as well as a fine of 4 million Egyptian pounds (approximately $80,000) on money laundering charges. On appeal, courts overturned some of the charges against her and upheld others, with rights groups describing the charges as “direct retaliation” against women influencers.
The severity of these sentences raise an obvious question: What could Mawada have possibly done to warrant spending her twenties behind bars?
Mawada’s real “crime” was neither money laundering nor exploitation; it was being a young, middle-class woman who dared to defy her community’s social norms, gained popularity, and earned money from her videos.
Criminalizing violations of “family values” is a relatively recent development in Egyptian law, but the underlying idea is not new. For years, the state has argued that its sovereignty is rooted in its role as the guardian of Egyptian cultural and societal norms. Article 10 of the Egyptian Constitution states: “The family is the nucleus of society, and is founded on religion, morality, and patriotism. The State shall ensure its cohesion, stability, and the establishment of its values.” Article 11 states that “the State shall protect women against all forms of violence and ensure enabling women to strike a balance between family duties and work requirements.”
Familial relations are intricate and multifaceted, making the task of “protecting” them a complex task that is hard to define. The state has repeatedly sought to control women’s bodies and autonomy, invoking its role as guardian of the family to justify restricting women’s rights.
This was evident in Egypt’s reservations to the United Nations’ Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) when it ratified the convention in 1981. At the time, Egypt argued that some of the convention’s articles conflicted with Sharia Law and Egyptian culture—specifically Article 2 concerning equality between men and women and the elimination of discrimination, and Article 16 concerning equality in family relations. Egypt also had a reservation to Article 9 on women’s right to pass their nationality to their children, but lifted it in 2008.
Egypt invoked religion and culture rather than its legal sovereignty to justify its reservations, though it is the state that decides how religion and culture are interpreted within the legal system in the first place.
The crackdown on content creators cannot be viewed separately from the state’s effort to reassert its authority across all spheres of life in Egypt
Sovereignty, the principle that states have the authority to govern their own affairs without foreign intervention, evolved as a foundational principle of international law, especially after the rise of liberation movements across the world. In Egypt, sovereignty is deeply intertwined with religious thought and cultural norms, as reflected in the constitution and practice of the country’s successive governments.
The crackdown on content creators cannot be viewed separately from the state’s effort to reassert its authority across all spheres of life in Egypt, online spaces included. The codification of “family values” in the law in 2018 coincided with a surge in social media use for expression, especially as civic and political spaces continued to shrink following the intensified crackdown that began in 2013. This period also saw the rise of TikTok and vlogging as important sources of income for many Egyptians during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
This expansion of online expression brought the state into direct conflict with content creators. Mawada was not the only content creator targeted. In a report entitled “Whose Values?”, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights documented how women were prosecuted not only for their appearance or dancing, but also for the perceived “vulgarity” of their language or even for eating in a “disgusting manner.”
By prosecuting Mawada and others, the state sends a clear message to its citizens that traditional, conservative values will be imposed by law, positioning itself as the guarantor of social order and cohesion. This could also explain why the crackdown has not been uniform: social class has typically influenced whether a content creator faces prosecution.
The state is more likely to punish women from less privileged backgrounds for their public departure from conservative norms associated with their social class. Content creators from wealthier backgrounds who publish similar content are largely spared comparable consequences. This selective enforcement reveals how the state treats different segments in society and the authority it seeks to exercise over them.
Internationally, Egypt frequently responds to criticism of its human rights record by arguing that the implementation of universal human rights in the country must account for religious and cultural particularities, invoking national sovereignty to defend this position.
By portraying liberal values and personal freedoms as part of a foreign agenda, state institutions seek to discredit the Egyptian feminist movement
To sustain this argument and its international image, the state must also reinforce the same narrative domestically. It deems Egyptian society as inherently conservative and uses this portrayal to justify controlling social media content, claiming that state sovereignty derives from the people and therefore requires defending their presumed moral values. Yet this justification becomes harder to sustain when people express a rising openness to different opinions or behaviors. Egyptian society already accommodates a wider range of views and behaviors than the state acknowledges. Rather than recognizing this diversity as a matter of freedom of expression, including the freedom to disagree, the state deals with certain forms of expression as crimes deserving punishment.
The crackdown also helps manage dissent. By portraying liberal values and personal freedoms as part of a foreign agenda, state institutions seek to discredit the Egyptian feminist movement. The state interprets demands by human rights actors to cease prosecuting TikTokers as calls for immorality, framing them as a direct threat to Egypt’s sovereignty, culture, and religion.
Feminist activists in Egypt have long challenged the notion that women’s rights are foreign imports. They have consistently grounded demands for equality within local social realities while simultaneously engaging international human rights frameworks. This approach has helped bring cases such as Mawada’s to public attention through a human rights perspective.
While moving forward requires reclaiming and examining the concepts of sovereignty and family values, we need to consider how accountability of such frameworks are built and enforced. As the state justifies oppressing women and girls by invoking “sovereignty,” it has encouraged a culture of citizen surveillance: Social media users can tag the official Ministry of Interior page in the comments section of videos they deem “immoral.” In some cases, the ministry responds by arresting the person in question, especially if the video attracts significant attention. The ministry then posts about these arrests on its social media pages as a testament of its role as the “the protector of public morality,” even when the perceived danger is merely a young woman dancing on TikTok.
Responding to the “family values” discourse requires more than rejecting conservative narratives. It requires constructing alternative understandings of family that recognize women’s autonomy, bodily integrity, and equal citizenship as essential—not contradictory—to social cohesion. It also requires challenging the false contradiction between universal human rights and cultural authenticity by demonstrating that demands for equality emerge from within Egyptian society itself. Although cases involving Tiktok creators have polarized public opinion, often through appeals to morality and honor, demands for equality before the law and social cohesion have long been part of Egyptian public discourse, including during and before the 2011 revolution.
The debate is not about choosing between sovereignty and human rights, or between family and women’s rights. Rather, it is about resisting political narratives that selectively invoke sovereignty and family values to consolidate state authority while limiting accountability. In Egypt, these concepts have become powerful tools of governance, shaping legal institutions, public discourse, and international diplomacy. Reclaiming them is therefore essential to advancing a vision of rights that is both locally grounded and universally and regionally protected.
Nada Nashat is a Nonresident Fellow at TIMEP focusing on women, rights, and accountability in Egypt.