Egypt’s Gen Z is Organizing While Sisi is Calling it Terrorism

(Photo by Hamada Elrasam for VOA via Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)

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Since last May, over 50 Egyptians have been arrested. In another preemptive strike from the authoritarian regime to stifle popular movement, reports of prolonged pretrial detention, torture, and terrorism charges for peaceful membership of a Discord Server. GenZ002 was set up in October 2025 by exiled Egyptian activist Anas Habib around the same time as the wave of Gen Z-led protest movements sweeping Nepal and Morocco.

Egyptian society is too often imagined as docile and frozen in time, viewed through a rigid outsider’s lens. Even moments of mass resistance are repackaged, erasing working-class participation, confrontational resistance, and Egypt’s long history of political struggle. Colonial ideas of Egypt remain prominent today as backwards, destined for authoritarianism and fundamentally different from democracy loving modern Europeans. 

The current case of a peaceful Discord server placing young digital activists in prison is both evidence against the above-mentioned mentality and offers clues on why there have not been large-scale protests in Egypt in years. 

It’s been fifteen years since protesters in Egypt used social media to organise against Hosni Mubarak, the state has developed a more sophisticated response. It can now monitor online networks, block platforms, trace social connections, seize devices, and use pretrial detention to punish people before they have been convicted. 

Now the government claims it has unravelled an online criminal network. A cesspool of pro-violence rhetoric, terrorist planning, and criminals gathered to network and plan their next anti-social move and spread lies, while equating membership in the GenZ002 Discord Server with being part of a “terrorist group.” 

Accusations Against GenZ002

The name of the server follows a similar formula to Morocco’s GenZ 212 movement: “Gen Z” refers to the generation, while the numbers come from the country’s international dialling code, +20 for Egypt and +212 for Morocco.

Under the Egyptian Supreme Court, over 50 GenZ0002 users are currently being investigated  for charges of joining an unlawful or “terrorist” group using social media to commit or promote terrorist offences, communicating with group members, misusing social media, and publishing “false news.” One of the most popular channels on the server was a call to remove the current president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. 

To remove Sisi through violent acts? I asked myself. Surely that must be the case based on the charges. Following the government crackdown, at least one person was tortured; that could not have been just for peaceful engagement, could it have been?  But it turned out the demand was to remove Sisi through an online national referendum. 

This referendum, by 18 January 2026, had received more than 500,000 responses. Yet, organisers later reported 1,965,495 anonymous votes were cast within a short period. Although this is according to the movement’s social media accounts and unverified, it shows the scope of the campaign as hashtags carried the initiative across other platforms.

This took place even though Discord was inaccessible through several major Egyptian internet providers on January 11th and 12th. On 25 January, the anniversary of Egypt’s 2011 uprising, authorities arrested at least one person for belonging to GenZ002. 

In any case, this could not be the terrorism and misuse of social media they were talking about, not to mention the fake news spreading charges. So I searched further; after all, holding elections to select the head of the state seems like a very reasonable request. I dug deeper and into the cesspool I went. 

Shared Frustrations For Digital Activists

GenZ002 hosted political discussions, alongside channels dedicated to football, books, and fitness sessions. Yet below all this, finally, I thought I had found it. The channel with mentions of bleeding and injuries everywhere. Yet, it turns out it was an “online first-aid course.” 

I was swamped; could there not have been any real crimes being committed? Could this have been an authoritarian pre-emptive persecution of young activists, who, according to the limited information available on detainees, largely came from Egypt’s economically strained popular and lower-middle classes, including students, public-sector workers, tradespeople and small-scale self-employed workers? A characteristic they share with the composition of many other GenZ movements around the globe in recent years? 

Article 65 of Egypt’s Constitution states that “everyone may express opinions through speech, writing, imagery or other forms of publication.” Yet people have been arrested and tortured. At least two of them were additionally interrogated about Facebook activity critical of the government, including comments on rising electricity and fuel prices and content reposted from opposition accounts.

GenZ002 organised weekly Discord discussions on political, economic, and security issues. Journalist Nezam Mahdawi said the conversations covered subjects including public debt, the sale of Egyptian land, prison conditions, Gaza, and Egypt’s Nile water rights.  

So could this be the false information spreading that the government claims? Well, if the government attempts to make that claim, it runs into another problem: much of what was discussed is not exactly difficult to verify.  While the exact content from the channels is not public, the state of wealth inequality, poverty, and unemployment, a general gutting of life in Egypt, is. 

Truthful Discussions Framed as False Information

In 2025, youth employment was very low, at around 19%. Formal employment is especially difficult to access, with precarious, informal, and gig work increasingly filling the gap. This is even worse for women, as employment was a mere 6% in 2025, compared to 31% for men. The economic policies of the government have mostly protected the existing political order and the military-security establishment rather than creating meaningful opportunities for young people. 

As such, while the content of the channels that spoke on the state of the economy and everyday life struggles is not public, painting a truthful discussion of them as the spread of false information would be in the best interest of the regime. 

Could it be that GenZ002’s significance and government crackdown is not simply due to the “digital activists” but its ability to bring otherwise dispersed frustrations into a shared online space? Among a broader generation experiencing educated unemployment, declining public services, precarious work and the erosion of wages through price increases. The government appears to understand the political potential of this combination. 

Lack of Legal Credibility in Government Charges

The prosecution has not publicly confirmed the exact legal provisions applied to each GenZ002 detainee. Lawyers interviewed by Matsda2sh argued that merely joining or briefly entering a Discord server did not prove participation in criminal activity. Yet, they did not identify the specific statutory articles being used. The accusations most likely fall under Egypt’s Cybercrime and Anti-Terrorism Laws. 

As such, I examined the provisions in these laws that most closely correspond to the charges described by Amnesty International and other reports:

1. Articles 27, 34, and 25 of Egypt’s Cybercrime Law:
   • Article 27 applies only when an online account is intentionally used to commit or facilitate another crime, which has not been publicly established for ordinary GenZ002 members. Article 34 only increases punishment after another cybercrime is proven, so criticism of the government or Discord membership alone is insufficient. Article 25 concerns privacy violations, unsolicited communications, and “family values,” none of which match the publicly reported GenZ002 allegations.
2. Articles 1, 12, 18, and 29 of the Anti-Terrorism Law:
   • These articles require evidence of a terrorist purpose, knowing participation, violent or intimidating methods, or the online promotion and coordination of terrorism. None of which are available in this case. 
3. Articles 102 and 188 of Egypt’s Penal Code:
   • These require knowingly or maliciously spreading false factual information likely to cause public harm, but authorities have not identified the allegedly false statements or shown that detainees knew them to be false.
4. Article 19, Media Regulation Law:
   • This article mainly regulates large accounts or websites with at least 5,000 followers, so it does not clearly justify detaining ordinary users who merely joined the server.

This list was supposed to give the government the benefit of the doubt of any legitimacy to their actions. That all of this is not the work of an authoritarian regime hell-bent on staying in power and crushing dissent even before it manifests itself on the streets.

But there is none. The government is showing this through its own decision to prosecute peaceful online activists under outrageously, almost comically, overblown charges. Charges that might even be laughable had they not tragically ruined so many lives, presenting no credible evidence that GenZ002 members planned violence, terrorism, or other serious crimes. On the contrary, the available evidence points to peaceful political discussion and organising. Terrorism and cybercrime laws are being used to suppress real discussions regarding the situation in Egypt.

Growing Pressure to Release GenZ

The GenZ002 case shows that Egypt’s political calm is not the absence of anger, but the result of repression before dissent can reach the streets. Economic hardship, youth unemployment, and declining public services remain, while the state has become better at monitoring, disrupting and criminalising organisations. 

This case, which requires international awareness and solidarity action to call for the release of those arrested, shows that the group is threatening because it gives young Egyptians a space to turn shared frustration into political discussion in mass numbers. The streets may be quiet, but the pressures underneath them are growing.

Edited by Isaac Code

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