The importance of social media activism in Egypt was far-reaching and multifaceted. The rise of social media activism marked a significant shift in Egypt’s political engagement landscape. It paved the way for the unprecedented mobilization witnessed during the 2011 revolution and continues to shape the country’s political and social discourse today.
This paper examines the transformative role of social media in Egyptian activism, focusing on its impact on communication strategies, government responses, traditional media dynamics, and long-term societal implications. The scoping review of relevant research about social media Egyptian activism examines the diverse communication strategies employed by activists across different platforms, analyses the impact of social media on traditional media and public opinion, and explores the long-term implications of online activism for Egyptian society and politics. The focus of this paper is to analyze the contributions of previous research about Activism in Egypt to identify the main areas of interest, and then to propose a research agenda about Activism in authoritarian countries. This paper applied a thematic and quantitative descriptive analysis to analyze the key features of a purposive sample of academic contributions, which are extracted from the EBSCOhost, JSTOR, Web of Science, and Google Scholar electronic databases, using keywords based on the concepts represented in the research question. The results provide researchers with a good understanding of the main debates about the potentials and challenges dominating this research area, and present suggestions for future research about the evolving dynamics of Social Media Activism in a repressive regime.

Authors:
Nagwa Fahmy, Zayed University, United Arab Emirates
Maha Attia, Ajman University, United Arab Emirates

About the Presenter(s)
Nagwa Fahmy, PhD., Cairo University, is an Associate Professor at the College of Communication and Media Sciences at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi.

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