Ennahda’s fake accounts: Brotherhood media from Banna’s newspapers to social media

Sarah Rashad

Tunisian President Kais Saied’s speech last Wednesday during the swearing-in ceremony of the new government cannot be summed up. He used a high tone of warning in which he accused political forces, which he did not name, of treason based on the tension that Tunisia continues to experience.

The Ennahda movement chose to respond by using fake social media accounts to attack the president’s speech. This opens a discussion about understanding the Brotherhood media’s mission and how the terrorist group has attached importance to it since its establishment in the 1920s.

Typical Brotherhood approach

Tunisian society has been shocked by Ennahda’s behavior, as it has been proven that it mobilized an army of fake social media accounts of individuals claiming to belong to countries in Southeast Asia in order to ridicule the president and publish identical statements with the aim of influencing Tunisian public opinion. But this is nothing new for the Brotherhood. In the middle of this year, Twitter revealed that it had deleted more than 7,000 fake accounts launched by the Turkish regime with the aim of supporting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s policies and attacking his opponents.

Twitter said in a statement at the time that 32,242 accounts were deleted due to violations of the platform’s manipulation policies, including 7,340 Turkish accounts.

The social media company explained that the Erdogan government used coordinated cyber activities as part of a focused advertising campaign targeting local public opinion in Turkey.

It added that according to analyses of technical indicators and account behavior, these platforms were exploited for propaganda to benefit Erdogan and improve his image and the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) policies among the Turkish masses.

Brotherhood media

In an article titled “How did the Muslim Brotherhood use media as a weapon to pass their ideas?”, published in September 2019, Ahmed Ban, a researcher on Islamist groups, wrote about the Brotherhood’s ideology, explaining its position regarding the media.

Ban concluded that since the Brotherhood’s inception, it has used the media as a tool for mobilizing and obtaining the loyalty of the masses.

He explained that Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna sought to establish a newspaper that would serve as the group’s mouthpiece and as a means to spread the organization’s ideology early on.

“On June 15, 1933, the Brotherhood launched the first issue of its weekly paper, which was originally planned to be daily. It was chaired by Sheikh Tantawi Jawhari, who was deceived by Hassan al-Banna’s project,” Ban noted.

He explained that the newspaper included a large number of Brotherhood members whose task was to distribute the newspaper issues throughout mosques, homes and shops.

“Within one year, the Brotherhood launched their own printing press to ensure that the newspaper was printed, along with the organization’s ideological messages, without any restrictions from governments,” Ban added.

In order to keep up with the times, Ban said that the group intended to employ the art of caricature. In August 1948, it launched a magazine, which it used to political destroy the group’s opponents.

The Brotherhood has also attached exceeding importance to social media, which is evidenced by Ennahda’s approach in Tunisia and before them the Brotherhood groups of Turkey and Egypt.

On social media, the group continued to utilize satire do to the ease of spreading it and its impact on internet users.

This is why the Brotherhood built the case for Abdullah Al-Sharif, who turned from a mere YouTube user with only dozens of viewers to a controversial program presenter.

Qatari channel Al-Jazeera used to show parts of Sharif’s episodes in his early days in order to make it easier for him to attract a Libyan audience.

The Brotherhood has tried to repeat the Sharif experience by means of a satirical program on Al-Tanasah TV, in which the presenter deliberately uses Sharif’s style in some episodes to promote the Libyan Brotherhood.

Ban also explained that the Brotherhood’s interest in social media in particular is difficult for governments to monitor compared to the group’s real presence on the ground.