This story was produced under the Feminist Journalist Fellowship, it is part of a series highlighting the work of our fellows, developed in collaboration with UntoldMag and Noor.
This article is also available to read in Arabic.
Day by day, patterns of hatred against LGBTQ+ individuals in Egypt specifically, and across North Africa and West Asia more broadly, are turning into something closer to a system.
Those on the receiving end are left with three options: hide their gender or sexual identity; declare it, and live with the threats, insults, and hatred that follow from religious and conservative traditionalists; or retreat from digital life by scaling back, or leaving for good.
Is what’s happening to Egypt’s queer community an organized campaign, or the ordinary cruelty of a hostile society, playing out at scale online? The people targeted increasingly don’t experience a difference. Coordinated or not, the pile-ons, the tracked locations, the death threats arrive the same way. This investigation follows that question through one woman’s account, a survey of 18 others, and a running argument among researchers over what to call what’s happening.
In ‘Roots of Hate: Fascist and Fundamentalist Narratives and Actors in South-West Asia and North Africa Regions,’, published by Noor in September 2024, researchers found that state and non-state actors weaponize misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia to enforce a rigid vision of “purity” rooted in the protection of family values.
These narratives do more than marginalize. They reinforce a social hierarchy in which gender and sexual conformity become symbols of national and cultural purity. And in doing so, they legitimize violence, both state-sanctioned and vigilante, against anyone who challenges these norms, entrenching the power of fascist and fundamentalist projects further still.
Digital Fascism
Noha Abeer (she/her), a young Egyptian woman who identifies as pansexual, still faces alarming levels of harassment on her social media accounts for showing her support for Egypt’s LGBTQ+ community. She receives daily messages and comments containing murder threats, a level of hostility that, she says, no longer surprises her.
“The attacks I’ve faced, and am still facing, are mostly defamation, insults, and stigma because I’m queer,” she says. “Mostly these look like coordinated group attacks, especially when I find my personal photos or videos being shared heavily all at once. Then I get comments or posts saying the same things, some from newly created accounts with no photos or friends.”
Her location, too, has been discovered, despite all her careful digital protection measures. Abeer avoids publishing any personal information about herself, her family, or her friends. She won’t post photos of landmarks near where she lives, and waits until she has left an event before posting about it. None of it was enough.
The attacks themselves have ranged from insults to demands for her deportation and the revocation of her Egyptian citizenship.
Among her attackers: an Egyptian page called the “National Council for Men,” which regularly targets women’s rights activists and sexual and gender minorities, and another, the “Revolution of the Fathers of Egypt to Change the Personal Status Law,” which called her “a slut” and “a prostitute.”
Influencers with millions of followers also posted video content attacking her directly.
Abeer believes Islamic groups may be behind the coordinated campaigns, aided by conservative-leaning influencers who produce video content inciting against her. “The attackers’ methods have become more violent,” she says, “because the attacks are becoming more vicious over time.”
According to Roots of Hate, what happened to Abeer fits a broader pattern: fundamentalist and conservative actors engaged in surveillance, evaluation, and coordinated action aimed at silencing a member of the LGBTQ+ community. The study calls this “digital fascism”.
As the study puts it:
“Framing gender and sexuality rights as a Western imposition on local cultures is often manifested through discourses about cultural imperialism, child protection, and preserving the family, which target and erase the struggles of LGBTQ+ communities in the region. […] These discourses are manipulated to advance anti-rights agendas and used to incite moral panic and justify the repression of LGBTQI+ individuals, portraying them as a threat to societal values and stability.”
Disturbing Results
Scarce research exists on the scale of online violence faced by the LGBTQ+ community in Egypt. To fill that gap, we ran a survey through closed, secure groups, promising confidentiality and asking respondents to share no identifying information.
Over three weeks, and despite the risk that the questions themselves might retraumatize people, 18 people responded. This is a small, self-selected sample, not a representative one, but the patterns it surfaces are consistent with what interview subjects describe independently.
The questions allowed multiple answers. Most respondents identified as gay or lesbian (9), followed by queer (5) and transgender (4); some also selected bisexual, pansexual, or other identities. Eleven preferred “she,” eight preferred “he,” and a smaller number chose other pronouns such as “they” or none. Most were between 25 and 35 (9), followed by 35–45 (6) and 18–25 (3).
Nearly all (17 of 18) named Facebook as their most-used platform, followed by YouTube and Instagram (10 each) and Telegram (8).
Thirteen of the 18 said they do not consider social media a safe space. This is the same number of those who have personally experienced cyber violence. Fourteen reported abuse, insults, or threats; seven, mass incitement or organized campaigns; five each reported having personal information posted, coordinated account-reporting, false claims about their nationality, or attempted account hacks.
Half described the violence they faced as coordinated or an organized campaign, not incidental cruelty, while five saw it as individual behavior. Twelve had been targeted more than once.
The psychological toll varies but repeats. Some respondents left Egypt and lost contact with their families. Others withdrew from social media, or from people altogether. Several described depression, constant fear, and a loss of trust in others.
“It greatly affected my feeling that my existence poses a danger to me,” one wrote, “and a desire to isolate myself most of the time.” Another: “There are no words to describe the psychological pain.” A third respondent said: “I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of these experiences.” Another respondent sought psychological support from several organizations due to a persistent feeling of fear and anxiety.Two testimonies stood out. One respondent said: “When I underwent gender reassignment surgery and moved from my home, neighbors from my old neighborhood saw me, took pictures of me, and shamed me in the area. This reached my family and deeply affected them. At university, they still called me by my pre-surgery name loudly and waited for me outside the university gates to harass me.” Another said: “I was beaten and dragged through a street café simply because they knew about my sexual orientation.”
Weeks ago, Abeer posted a photo of herself at a Pride march, holding a rainbow flag. The response was immediate: comments, reposts, threats. “They have already affected me,” she says. “I cannot post pictures of myself with my friends or family. I have not thought about remaining silent or disappearing from social media, if that happens, it will be by my own choice, not because of them. I have feelings of anger, and sometimes fear.”
Asked why they believed they were targeted, respondents pointed overwhelmingly to religion and perceived deviance from social norms: “an attack based on religious beliefs and societal values, if they even possess them”; “because I’m gay, an atheist, and a transgender person”; “religion and traditions.” One respondent said it plainly: “They claim it’s against religious principles, and it’s common knowledge in society that they have the right to hit, insult, and use all kinds of violence, even if they find me walking alone in the street.” Another respondent’s attacker went further, denying their right to exist at all: “Their personal view is that I don’t deserve to exist.”
Abeer’s own experience tracks the same pattern: her attackers fault her clothing, the way she speaks, and accuse her of smoking, drinking, and being “deviant and supporting deviance,” as she puts it.
The data reflects this: 14 respondents identified traditional or conservative individuals as their attackers, 13 named religious extremists, 10 named friends or acquaintances with differing views, and 3 named organized groups on platforms like Facebook or Telegram.
Digital Fascism or a Collective Reaction?
Hostility toward gender and sexual diversity online rarely announces itself as direct insult alone. According to the Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right study, it also spreads through systems of misinformation that recast a targeted group as a social danger requiring confrontation. This is the same logic that gave rise to the so-called “alt-right,” which builds online communities around satire, memes, and jokes that conceal racist, anti-women, and anti-gay messages underneath.
In Egypt, this pattern has a name: “Hahaha Jihad”. The term, coined by bloggers and social media users as a satirical, non-academic label, describes groups who treat mocking posts and laughing reactions as a kind of religious battle against those who express or support LGBTQ+ identity.
The pattern is consistent with that of the far right, a joke, a laughing reaction, a meme, a sarcastic comment or “troll” post that gradually hardens into organized hate speech.
But not everyone agrees these attacks amount to an organized campaign. Nora Noralla (she/her), director of the Cairo 52 Center for Gender and LGBTQ+ Issues, argues there’s been no real surge in attacks on LGBTQ+ people in Egypt, and no organized group behind them.
In her view, framing it that way creates the impression that queer people are the only victims, when what’s actually changed is that Egyptian social media now carries more discussion and interaction of every kind than before. Some queer activists who take controversial public positions, she says, naturally draw threats and hostility, and queer people cannot be separated from a conservative Egyptian context that treats any nonconforming discourse as an attack on itself.
She points out that this same rise in digital hostility touches groups worldwide and not only in Egypt, including people with no connection to human rights work: women branded “disobedient,” men branded “cuckolds,” gay men branded with the slur “effeminate.” She also notes that Meta’s loosened content moderation has made it easier for anyone to say anything, hostile or not, and advises those who want to avoid harassment to restrict their accounts to friends only.
This sits uneasily against what our own survey found: half of respondents described the violence they faced as coordinated, not incidental, and Abeer’s account of simultaneous pile-ons from freshly created, history-less accounts points the same way. Noralla’s “more discussion, not more danger” reading may hold at the platform level but perhaps not on the individual one.
Other research pushes back on this hypothesis more directly: the Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right study argues that digital hatred doesn’t appear spontaneously, but is produced by political and media networks that manufacture narratives of threat and fear, then recycle them until they calcify into social attitudes and, sometimes, into real violence. Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics offers a name for what that process produces. Cohen defines a “moral panic” as a situation, event, or group perceived as a threat to societal values and interests; the targeted group becomes a “folk devil” or a symbol onto which social anxiety is projected, standing in for everything a society has decided to reject. Individuals disappear into a flattened stereotype, useful precisely because it can be mobilized against.
Seen this way, digital violence is one link in a longer chain, beginning as hate speech online, extending past the screen into social and legal consequence. It belongs to a broader pattern of contemporary fascism, one that operates not only through overt state systems but through everyday practices: religious, moral, technological, that quietly reproduce control. Violence against LGBTQ+ people, in this frame, is not simply the fallout of social prejudice. It is a tool: one piece of a larger project to reshape public life around exclusion and domination.