Egypt: TikTok provides technological support to protect children from cybercrime 🇪🇬 🛡️

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On July 10, Egypt’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Raafat Hendy, met with Emir Gelen, TikTok’s Executive Director of Public Policy for the Middle East, Eurasia and Africa. The goal was clear: curb the risks young Egyptians face on social media, this time by leaning on the platform’s own technology.

Egypt turns to TikTok to strengthen child cybersecurity 🔐

The talks took place on the sidelines of the World Summit on the Information Society Forum 2026 (WSIS 2026), hosted in Geneva under Egypt’s presidency, where online child safety was high on the agenda. Egypt’s National Telecom Regulatory Authority (NTRA) and TikTok reportedly discussed cooperation on digital-skills programs, and explored ways to boost educational content on the platform — particularly around science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) — with the aim of turning the app into more of a learning tool.

A dedicated SIM card for minors, built for traceability 📱

The TikTok talks are only one piece of a broader push. Back in April, Minister Hendy had already announced a SIM card designed specifically for minors, developed with Egypt’s four mobile operators, to give parents and regulators better visibility into how children use their phones. The initiative builds on the Child Internet Risk Index, launched by Cairo in February 2026 to measure how exposed children aged 5 to 12 are to online risks.

TikTok’s cooperation with Egypt comes as the platform steps up its own moderation. According to its latest transparency report, TikTok removed more than 2.38 million videos in Egypt in the fourth quarter of 2025 for community-guideline violations — making the country the third-largest source of such takedowns in the Arab world. Globally, TikTok says it closed nearly 23.9 million accounts suspected of belonging to children under 13 during that same period — another sign of how large this challenge has grown worldwide.

Egypt’s fight against the darker side of social media, then, is no longer just a national issue. It’s a technological and societal challenge that increasingly concerns the whole planet.

What do you think — can a dedicated SIM card and a TikTok partnership actually keep children safe online? Let us know in the comments.