Considerable academic focus has been directed towards exploring the roles played by online media in initiating and shaping Egypt’s uprisings experienced since 2011. However, little is known about whether electronic media outlets remained a political agent in post-revolutionary Egypt or not. The current work seeks to redress this gap, relying on unique data collected in April 2016 from a representative sample of 1200 Egyptian adults. Findings show that electronic media consumption leads to increased demands for democratic regimes and negative positions towards Islamic governments. Furthermore, online media use enhances citizens’ protesting behaviour rather than voting action. In the online domain, electronic media exposure instigates more online political activism among online media users. Arguably, the current work concludes that online media have still been a potent democratizing actor in today’s Egypt as it had been during the 2011 and 2013 insurgencies, yet taking different forms and diverse degrees.

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This paper examines the religious implications of Internet exposure in the Arab region, which is deemed a world's hub for both religious devotion and hostility. Utilizing the mediatization of religion theory, this work argues that frequent exposure to the Internet enhances religious openness in the region, attitudinally as well as behaviorally. To empirically investigate this assumption, the study utilizes a unique cross-national survey interviewing more than 25,000 participants from 12 Arab countries, during 2018 and 2019. Findings show that the rise and spread of the Internet cultivates religious openness among Arabs. Specifically, Internet use is positively associated with increasing acceptance of the religious other and with growing support for gender equality. In addition, Internet users are more likely to perceive religion as a private rather than public matter, and more willing to support the separation between religion and politics. Arguably, the results conclude that the growth of online communication in the region helps "democratize" the Arab religious sphere, giving way to new religious agents, beliefs, and practices to flourish. The implications of digital media use for conventional religious authority and secularization processes in the Arab region are further discussed.