A study in which Moataz O Saleh Founder and CEO of Shield Consultancy , unravels how the trade of selling Arab social media pages and groups to foreigners poses a threat to our beloved Egypt.
Saleh explains that Facebook pages are created daily offering various kinds of content such as cultural, humorous, satirical and scientific, with the aim of gaining thousands of followers, some of which reach over a million daily active users from our beloved Egypt and other Arab countries.
The owners of some of these pages and groups with such electronic content are not looking for enriching Arabic content, delighting followers and viewers, providing valuable information, or even displaying goods or promoting them through Facebook pages, but are looking to gather the highest number of followers so that their page or group is in good order in terms of activity so as to attract advertisers. On the other hand, there are others who do this with a different goal in mind, which is to offer these pages for sale on foreign websites interested in buying and selling such pages. These websites also connect buyers and sellers and ensure the completion of the transaction by securing a commission on the sale of more than just a few thousand dollars.
When browsing such a foreign site, it is unfortunate to find hundreds of Egyptian pages and well-known groups displayed in exchange for thousands of dollars. Since these pages are in high demand, there are also many buyers on the site who bid to get them.
The biggest risk associated with these foreign websites is that most of those buyers are anonymous in that they do not disclose their identity on the site nor do they use their real names, but merely a nickname, which poses a threat to our beloved country, as some of them buy these pages to engage in objectionable behaviors by targeting certain public figures and countries, writing about them, poking fun at heads of states, as well as turning some people against each other under the pretext of humor by mocking and ridiculing their religion, daily life, or sports.
However, their ulterior motive behind buying these pages is to use them to spread their poison in our beloved country by exploiting the one flaw in Egypt’s national security, which is the electronic portal. There are also many pages that started spontaneously and gained a massive following overnight, pointing their arrows at the state and it’s unclear how this was done. So we took it upon ourselves to throw a light on this not-so-visible threat that could result from this kind of electronic trade and lead to the misuse of sold pages and groups by buyers who have been lying in wait for an opportunity to wreak havoc on our society. And so we’re sounding the alarm before the dangers of this kind of trade befalls us.
