alleged support of terrorist groups by Qatar and Turkey, Iran’s activity in Yemen, the conflict in Libya, successes of the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, and independence for Somaliland” (DFRLab, 2019). The Egyptian company, run by former military officer Amir Hussein, was also found to be involved in a covert operation to praise Sudan’s military on social media days after Sudanese soldiers killed pro-democracy demonstrators in Khartoum in June. The New York Times revealed that the company paid new recruits $180 a month to write pro-military messages using fake accounts on various social media platforms. Although sufficient evidence to link the operation to the Egyptian government was not found, according to the New York Times, there were many hints that such a link existed (Walsh and Rashwan, 2019). An additional influence operation attributed to actors within Egypt surfaced in April 2020 when Twitter announced the takedown of 2541 accounts and 7.9 million tweets. The accounts were found to be linked to the El Fagr newspaper. Previous takedowns on Facebook and Instagram in October 2019 were also found to be related to El Fagr. The accounts consisted of both fake accounts and bots who tweeted various news content, commercial content, as well as subversive political astroturfing content. To topics in this dataset are similar to topics in past Egypt-attributed takedowns that include negative content towards rivals such as Qatar and Iran and positive content towards the Egyptian government (DiResta et al., 2020). COVID 19 and misinformation: The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has heavily influenced the global disinformation landscape. According to Washington Post “In some countries the virus has provided a pretext for governments to pass emergency legislation that is likely to curb freedoms long after the contagion has been extinguished”. In the Middle East governments have detained and punished journalists who questioned the way the state has been dealing with the pandemic. In Egypt, the press credentials of Guardian’s correspondent, Ruth Michaelson, were revoked by the Egyptian government after she reported on a study that questioned Egypt’s official number of coronavirus cases (Loveluck et al., 2020). Beyond these threats against journalists, Egyptian authorities have used the vague charge of “spreading false news” and “terrorism” to arrest and detain a number of health workers who spoke out on various safety concerns regarding in safe working conditions, personal protective equipment, limited testing of health care workers, etc. Amnesty international (2020) has documented the cases of eight health care workers who were arbitrarily detained between March and June for their concerns posted on social media. Table 2: Observed Strategies, Tools and Techniques of Social Media Manipulation in Egypt Account Types Messaging and Valence Content and Platforms Communication Strategies Fake, real, bots, Impersonated accounts 125 Amplification of pro- and Disinformation, fabricated anti-regime political content, photos, troll armies, pro-Palestine and anti-Muslim amplification of hashtags Brotherhood hashtags, online harassment, Anti-Turkey, Qatar, Iran and Libya. Pro Saudi intervention in Yemen, pro-Somalia independence, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram