Morocco: Journalist Bouchra El Khonchafi targeted by online smear and defamation campaigns

Read in Arabic / للقراءة بالعربية

Skyline International for Human Rights strongly condemns the systematic and escalating defamation campaigns targeting Moroccan journalist Bouchra El Khonchafi. These attacks are marked by an alarming level of personal animosity and represent a calculated effort to weaponize online gender-based violence and medical privacy violations as tools of political intimidation.

Bouchra El Khonchafi—the wife of Hamid El Mahdaoui, editor-in-chief of the independent Moroccan online news platform Badil.info—has recently become the target of a coordinated smear campaign across social media led by pro-government accounts. Orchestrated by accounts known for targeting independent voices in Morocco, the attacks have moved beyond professional criticism into the sphere of severe personal ethics violations. This campaign of harassment includes mocking El Khonchafi's health status while she undergoes medical treatment and launching direct assaults on her personal dignity.

Skyline International has monitored several high-reach accounts involved in the online defamation, most notably the "J'aime Oujda" page on Facebook with over 500,000 followers, Yassine Hiani with over 32,000 followers, and the "Kinan Moutaraji" account on X (formerly Twitter). These accounts have posted inflammatory content aimed at inciting public hatred against El Khonchafi and tarnishing her reputation. Such posts leverage gender-based insults and private health struggles to silence her while simultaneously exerting intense psychological pressure on her husband, who is already facing significant judicial harassment.

Following a lawsuit filed by the Moroccan Minister of Justice, Abdellatif Ouahbi, the Rabat Court of Appeal in June 2025 upheld an 18-month prison sentence and a fine of 1.5 million dirhams (approx. $150,000) against El Mahdaoui. Press freedom groups, including the National Syndicate of the Moroccan Press, have widely condemned the case as judicial retaliation for his investigative work. While El Mahdaoui remains at the center of the legal battle, the focus of the online coordinated campaigns has shifted toward his wife in an apparent attempt to break the family’s morale and impose a state of psychological siege. Proxy punishment of this kind targets the family members of journalists to force their silence, reduce solidarity with their causes, and undermine their credibility in conservative Moroccan society.

The case of El Khonchafi is not isolated but part of a broader trend in Morocco where moral accusations and the targeting of private lives are increasingly used to undermine the credibility of activists and journalists. Exploitation of the country’s conservative social context allows such campaigns to strip critical voices of their public standing and legitimacy. Such practices entrench a climate of intimidation and pose a severe threat to freedom of expression and the public's right to access information. The lack of effective domestic mechanisms to counter digital hate speech and defamation has allowed such tactics to flourish, effectively making the families of journalists vulnerable to retaliation for their professional work.

The ongoing smear campaigns and online harassment violate Article 24 of the Moroccan Constitution, which guarantees the right to the protection of private life, and contradict the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which Morocco is a state party. Article 17 of the ICCPR explicitly protects individuals from arbitrary or unlawful interference with their privacy, family, home, or correspondence and from unlawful attacks on their honor and reputation. The failure of the Moroccan Public Prosecution to intervene against well-known defamatory accounts suggests a state-sanctioned policy of intimidation.

Skyline International for Human Rights calls on the Moroccan authorities to:

• Launch an immediate and transparent investigation into the digital networks responsible for violating Bouchra El Khonchafi’s medical privacy and personal dignity, ensuring that those behind the defamatory campaigns are held accountable.
• Provide urgent protection for the families of journalists, recognizing that the targeting of spouses is an unacceptable form of indirect censorship and a violation of basic human rights.
• Take concrete steps to end the climate of impunity that allows social norms to be weaponized to isolate and discredit women journalists and human rights defenders.

We also urge social media platforms, including Meta and X, to take immediate action against coordinated inauthentic behavior in Morocco. These platforms must enforce their community standards and policies to prevent their services from being used to carry out defamation and smear campaigns and ensure that accounts responsible for targeted harassment and privacy violations are deplatformed.

Skyline International stands in unwavering solidarity with Bouchra El Khonchafi. We will continue to document these violations and raise her case with relevant international human rights mechanisms to ensure these digital crimes do not go unnoticed.