On Saturday, July 13, Arabic CNN website posted a report entitled Newspapers: Jihad Marriage at Rabia Square and Morshed’s Prostitute. Global News Website reported its information based on numerous Arab newspapers, which quoted theirs from Facebook pages and the ‘Egyptian Salafist Youth Coalition’ page. This latter, however, was just a parody that was initiated, along with its counterparts, with the arrival of Islamists to power in Egypt a year ago to fabricate news against the Islamists.

On Saturday, July 13, Arabic CNN website posted a report entitled Newspapers: Jihad Marriage at Rabia Square and Morshed’s Prostitute. Global News Website reported its information based on numerous Arab newspapers, which quoted theirs from Facebook pages and the ‘Egyptian Salafist Youth Coalition’ page. This latter, however, was just a parody that was initiated, along with its counterparts, with the arrival of Islamists to power in Egypt a year ago to fabricate news against the Islamists. Thus, rumors of “Jihad Marriage” and “Morshed’s prostitute” could eventually be reported by the credible global website of CNN to become “news”.

Rumors have many definitions, perhaps the most eloquent and brief one is Princeton’s which defines a rumor as a ‘masked message that lacks evidence’. The message in concern is masked, for it is usually similar to the targeted subject as “legitimate privacy” rumors apply for Islamists, “immorality” suits liberals, “dissent” implies military and so forth.

The old conception assumes that rumors exist where society lacks sources of information and governments spread of propagandas that serve their interests. Egyptians were aware of this at the beginning of the 1967 War set back when they cheered the overwhelming victories broadcast by the official radio before they woke up to the contrary reality. After 40 years, Iraqis lived a similar situation with the “news” of their famous Minister of Information Sa’eed Sahaf, who reported the good news of their victory against the Americans. He also managed to deceive many Arabs despite being exposed to several media means before all woke up to the easy arrival of the Americans to Baghdad. Such discourse was merely a type of rumor known as ‘rumors of the state’.

However, Facebook, Twitter, diverse satellite TV channels and generations of smart phones have become, in turn, the fastest means to spread rumors. In addition, circulating the story over the available publishing platforms, irrespective of any source validation would result in recycling contradicted news for days.

A rumor spreads like one well-known game played on summer nights, which starts by each player whispering one part of a tale to the one next to him or her to be completed by the other player to the next one and so on till the end of the circle, so that the tale ends with details that are completely different from its beginning.

The game is similar to the technique of rumor dissemination through what is known as “language filtering,” which means changing the details of the tale through verbal carrying, affected by the carrier’s impressions. This needs a few people in order to change the details of the rumor. Of course, the tale may branch to enormous dimensions with its arithmetic progression among millions of people.

Definitions of rumors vary but they unanimously agree on their flourishing, namely during crises and major events. It is not surprising that the Arab Spring was accompanied by a huge amount of rumors, whether the ones that described the imaginary wealth of the past regimes’ figures and the money that can be, according to the rumors, distributed to the whole nation or the “national” rumors that claimed the existence of major threats, such as approaching enemy warships or the existence of a plan of an impending foreign occupation. The latter may cause fascist reactions and distrust of foreigners, as well as the “gossip rumors” like “legitimate privacy” and “immorality” or the defaming rumors such as charges of corruption or treason.

A rumor spreads faster in the geographically and culturally homogeneous environment, such as the countryside and closed communities or within the people of the same language or a common religious sect. It may be classified psychologically according to dreams, wishes, apprehensions or just the desire to draw the attention of others. Its dissemination may be classified temporally, differentiating between the “creeping rumor”, that takes a long time to spread and is usually related to slander and defamation, the “bomb rumor”, which spreads quickly during crises and disasters and is characterized by its bloody nature, such as violent events or gang rape, and finally, the “diving rumor” which disappears and appears at spaced intervals of time and may be related to certain type of crimes, rotten foods or fairy practices of a certain sect.

“Conspiracy rumor” tops all the aforementioned types, which creates an indirect explanation of the events that lie behind the official image, including the explanation of the Arab Spring itself with all its events and uprisings of its people as an outcome of a major conspiracy that is of Western, Islamic, coup, Zionist or even Masonic origin.