What it’s like when everyone blames you for the Suez Canal jam...
Disinformation made Marwa Elselehdar the villain of the internet’s favourite saga in the Suez. Then she took control of the narrative. The last three weeks have been absurd, even surreal, for Marwa Elselehdar. On the day the internet’s favourite cargo ship, Ever Given, got diagonally stuck across Egypt’s Suez Canal for nearly a week, it launched thousands of viral memes, conspiracy theories, and rumours.
Elselehdar, who is Egypt’s first woman sea captain, found herself in a vortex of a vicious disinformation campaign that falsely blamed her for piloting Ever Given—the largest container ship in the world, which is nearly a quarter-mile long—and “crashing” it into the Suez Canal. “From what I saw, the fake posts came up within hours of Ever Given getting stuck,” Elselehdar told VICE World News from Cairo. “In fact, I was hundreds of miles away in Alexandria aboard the AIDA IV ship, and my friends alerted me to the viral posts.”
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https://www.instagram.com/tv/CMz7N9b...ource=ig_embed
https://www.vice.com/en/article/3anx...n-ship-captain