Activism from Exile: Online Mobilization and Repression in Egypt

How do activists in exile mobilize citizens back home, and how do regimes respond when they do? In this paper, we conduct process tracing of recent protests in Egypt to explore how activists abroad mobilize domestic populations, and how the targeted regime responds, through digital channels. In early September 2019, Egyptian activists in exile circulated information over Twitter about extensive corruption under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. In response, 2,000 individuals protested in Egyptian cities between September 20 and September 27 calling for the president’s removal in a brave and impressive demonstration given the current highly repressive environment in Egypt. The regime not only responded with brute force and the arrests of over 4,000 people, but also exploited Twitter’s reporting mechanism to remove the accounts of activists abroad, effectively silencing them. We analyze millions of Arabic- and English-language tweets containing keywords related to the protests to trace the process through which exiled activists spread information through domestic Twitter networks, then called for and organized protests. We also use information about Twitter activity to determine which accounts the Sisi regime reported and forced to be shut down, shedding light on strategies of online repression by authoritarian regimes.