Egyptian Government Establishes A Dedicated Hotline For Whatsapp To Report Fake News

To battle false news, Egypt has set up a new hotline for its citizens’ which will operate on WhatsApp and will provide them the facility to report any news that endangers the nations’ security or public interests. The citizens of Egypt can report any of the scripted news by texting the General Prosecution Office via the WhatsApp hotline.

According to the recent reports, the committee has agreed to its article 7, which monitors and handles the blocking of websites based on internal and external broadband affairs. The larger population is of the opinion that Egypt controls the media and censors the news according to the government’s needs.

Since 2017, Egypt has been blocking Qatar based websites like Al-Jazeera, the Huffington Post Arab etc and the reason for this has been stated that these respected news agencies and their governments fabricate news stories and also encourage terrorism.           

This trend has continued in 2018, and the government of Egypt has come under fire from its critics for having blocked news outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN. These websites have been blocked for the mobile users of Egypt.

Although the websites remain inaccessible through the traditional way, users can still access them through a VPN.