The Muslim Brotherhood exploits cyberspace and social media platforms to implement its ideological and organizational schemes, relying on a systematic strategy aimed at spreading its extremist ideology and recruiting new members. This is done through what is known as the “electronic brigades,” with both secret and public pages run from inside and outside the country.
The group’s main activity centers on broadcasting incitement messages and malicious rumors targeting state institutions, stirring public opinion against governments by amplifying events and distorting facts. The Brotherhood wraps its discourse in humanitarian or rights-based language, while in reality pushing political agendas that seek to undermine stability and revive its rejected political project.
The Brotherhood also relies on recycling old ideological content formulated by its founders—most notably Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb—who laid down the foundations of concepts like Hakimiyya (divine sovereignty), Jahiliyya (ignorance of God), and Ustadhiyyat al-‘Alam (mastership of the world). These ideas are exploited to build a closed intellectual environment that rejects others and justifies violence. The group uses them to attract youth through audio-visual content, employing emotional language and flashy slogans.
Electronic Committees and Fake Accounts
The Brotherhood was among the first Islamist movements to grasp the importance of digital media, seeking to employ it in advancing its political project and transnational ideology, centered on dreams of “reviving the Caliphate and world leadership.” It has succeeded in establishing a wide online presence through numerous websites bearing its name or supporting its cause, which it uses to promote extremist ideas across borders.
The organization exploits modern digital intelligence tools, relying on online committees and fake accounts to target young people with impactful visual content. This content attempts to infiltrate minds with satirical posts, disinformation, and manipulated trends.
These pages aim to sow doubt in state institutions, distort achievements, and mislead followers—especially the youth—into believing the group offers solutions, when in fact it brings only bloodshed and ruin.
The Brotherhood also sets up networks of fake pages and accounts that run coordinated digital campaigns to steer online debates, influence public sentiment, and attempt to penetrate influential platforms. It seeks to spread confusion by posting misleading news, doctored images, and fabricated videos.
Hidden Foreign Funding
These digital plans form part of a broader strategy that includes foreign funding and support from front organizations operating under the guise of charity or human rights. In reality, their true purpose is to serve the Brotherhood’s project and expand its influence. Security agencies in several countries have stressed the need to confront this digital warfare, considering it a main front in the battle against terrorism and extremist ideology.
Although the direct messaging of these pages often appears propagandistic and inciting against governments, their deeper goal is to create an atmosphere of “informational chaos” within society—making it difficult for citizens to distinguish truth from lies. Security studies describe this as “informational trust erosion.” Such an environment enables the Brotherhood to slip in political messages and weakens the state’s ability to mobilize popular support for its policies.
Undermining State Authority and Intimidating Individuals
Looking at the Brotherhood’s history reveals its pattern of attempting to infiltrate influential areas of society—such as professional syndicates, student unions, clubs, and youth centers. But it has repeatedly failed on the ground, so it turned to social media to compensate for its losses, especially after preemptive security measures thwarted its street activity.
To attract wider audiences, the group created pages seemingly unrelated to its ideology—such as those on art, culture, history, science, or sports. Yet security agencies consistently expose and reveal these schemes to the public.
Satire plays a central role in the Brotherhood’s online arsenal. Its committees and media outlets mock everything related to state governance or achievements, belittling them to convince citizens that the state does nothing for them, and that all its actions are trivial and useless in addressing their harsh living conditions. This approach also erodes the state’s prestige and undermines its officials through ridicule, jokes, humiliation, and the spread of psychological intimidation and cultural assassination.
Evading Security Pursuit
TikTok has become a central tool in this shift, via anonymous accounts recycling old sermons and religious or motivational slogans, presented with an “inspirational” tone but without direct mention of the Brotherhood. In this way, they create a state of “unconscious acceptance” of Brotherhood ideology, especially among the youth.
On YouTube, the activity is more organized, with political talk shows broadcast on Brotherhood-affiliated, foreign-backed channels. These programs appear to offer general political critique but actually recycle the group’s narratives of victimhood, legitimacy, and “coup.”
Facebook remains central, especially through closed groups that serve as spaces for ideological and organizational mobilization. Here, speeches of historic leaders are republished, and live-streamed meetings reinforce the group’s narrative of persecution.
The Brotherhood has even shifted its internal meetings and ideological sessions from mosques, homes, and apartments to cyberspace to avoid security crackdowns. In addition to mainstream platforms, it uses specialized applications like ClickMeeting Webinars, Zoom Cloud Meetings, GoToWebinar, and EasyWebinar.
Digital Warfare and Subversive Plans
Experts stress that effectively countering this cyberwarfare requires developing mechanisms to detect disinformation early, launching continuous awareness campaigns to teach the public how to identify rumors, who is behind them, and why they are spread at specific times. National media platforms must be strengthened with attractive content that can compete using the same tools as the Brotherhood. International cooperation to exchange information on suspicious digital networks and cut off their funding sources is also essential.
Terrorism expert Ibrahim Rabie stated that the Brotherhood uses social media as a main tool in executing its destructive schemes, describing its “electronic brigades” as among its most dangerous arms in spreading extremist thought and inciting violence.
He explained that after its political downfall in several countries—chief among them Egypt—the Brotherhood turned to digital warfare to make up for its street-level failures. It created fake pages and accounts run from abroad to mislead public opinion, distort facts, and stoke anger.
These pages, he added, operate according to organized plans, not randomly, transmitting propaganda wrapped in humanitarian or rights-based slogans, but in essence carrying messages of hatred and hostility toward state institutions.
He emphasized that the Brotherhood recycles the old ideological content of its founders, targeting youth through emotional rhetoric, with the aim of recruiting them into its ranks. These moves, he noted, form part of a comprehensive strategy that uses modern technology as a weapon to spread chaos and sow societal division.
Rabie stressed the need to confront these terrorist pages through legal and technical deterrence, while also raising community awareness about the dangers of falling prey to rumors, affirming that the battle of awareness is the most crucial front in confronting extremist thought.
Cyberspace as an Alternative Battlefield
Similarly, terrorism expert Hisham al-Najjar said that after the Brotherhood’s political project failed in the region, it redirected its full capacity to cyberspace, employing it as an alternative battlefield in its war against states and societies.
He asserted that the group’s so-called “digital militia” represents its most dangerous arm today, producing incitement content and orchestrated rumors aimed at eroding citizens’ trust in their institutions.
Najjar explained that these electronic brigades are run from overseas centers with massive funding that enables them to use advanced techniques to fabricate news and manipulate images and videos—allowing them to steer public opinion toward chaos and division. The discourse of these pages, he added, is flexible in form but constant in goal: undermining state stability and reviving the group’s influence.
He noted that the Brotherhood employs digital media tools to repackage extremist ideological concepts based on the ideas of Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, adapting them for platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube in an attempt to attract youth audiences.
Najjar stressed that countering this threat requires not only security measures but also social awareness campaigns and counter-media efforts that expose the Brotherhood’s deceptions and reveal its methods, so that social media platforms do not become weapons in the organization’s hands for spreading destruction.
