The digital divide in the journalism sector

Global digital economy

The discourse on technology as a driver for prosperity glosses over the use of technology as a driver for more consumerism and entertainment, rather than for citizen participation, genuine debates, and human capital development. Social media sites, for one, were once credited for providing a new avenue for unprecedented, successful mobilization that bypassed the need for physical meeting spaces and other logistical resources. However, this optimistic vision of technology as a liberating tool that gives voice to the voiceless mobilizes people across the globe, and challenges elite discourse, has now been replaced by a pessimistic view. Now, the digital sphere can be (mis)used to ramp up disinformation campaigns, hate speech, and political polarization, not to mention the challenges in regulating social media content, or controlling the dominance of certain platforms (Persily, 2019).

Giant corporations like Google turn data into profit in a global information economy where data has become the new production motor. Here, users’ personal data is collected, packaged, and sold in a new business model based on big data with the aim of microtargeting users through online ads. This model has been coined ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff, 2019) and is controlled by a handful of giant corporations that control an unprecedented amount of data on users worldwide. Big Tech also holds the global digital advertising industry; Google alone can siphon user data across its various applications – from Maps to Ads and Gmail – and sell it back to local firms that cannot develop competing technology. This means that ‘those who have more and better data can create the best artificial intelligence services, which attracts more users, which gives them even more data to make the service better, and so on’ (Kwet, 2019).

The online economy then relies on offering a seemingly free service to collect data that is used in targeting online ads according to individuals’ preferences (Kreitem and Ragnedda, 2020). In this new online economy, users’ attention and engagement, or audience metrics, have become the basis of the production and distribution of digital content, regardless of the quality of this content. In this business model, Arab news institutions do not control their own value chain but are part of a much more complex business ecosystem that includes digital platforms (Kawashima, 2020). Moreover, users with high purchasing power, such as in Saudi Arabia, are often more valuable for advertisers than less privileged users, which mimics economic inequality in the offline realm, and exacerbates the digital divide.

International organizations such as the UN have highlighted the need for digital inclusion in terms of providing digital access as well as digital competencies to all users and thereby addressing the three levels of the digital divide: access, competencies, and tangible outcomes of using digital technologies (Ragnedda, 2017; Van Dijk, 2020). Thus, the digital divide has been expanded to include different uses of the internet, and the development of one’s digital skills, or what is known as the ‘second level’ of the digital divide (Ragnedda et al., 2022), while the third level refers to the users’ ability to materialize concrete outcomes of their digital usage. Research into the digital divide used to focus on the first and second levels of the divide or users’ online access and competencies within countries, particularly in the so-called Global South (Ragnedda and Gladkova, 2020). However, there is now burgeoning research into the third level (e.g., Ragnedda, 2017; Ragnedda and Muschert, 2018; Van Deursen et al., 2017) or users’ ability to derive tangible outcomes from their online engagement. Research into the global divide (e.g., Coleman, 2019; Pisa and Polcari, 2019; Kwet, 2019) also highlights the divide not only in terms of access and skills but also in exploitation of users’ data, and the dominance of Tech Giants such as Google of the digital market with their massive resources and near-monopoly over the global digital platforms. For instance, Google’s broadband project in Africa was claimed to provide an affordable connectivity infrastructure while opening up the African markets for Google (Coleman, 2019).

Another way to examine the third level of the digital divide (in terms of tangible outcomes) is through an analysis of specific cultural sectors such as journalism, which is the focus of this paper. The aim is to document the divide not only in terms of access and skills but also to illustrate how this divide hinders users and journalists in the Global South, such as the Arab region, from benefiting fully from digital technologies.

In the following section, I briefly discuss the impact of the first and second-level digital divides in the Arab journalism field focusing on the disparities in access to training and data. Then, I examine in more detail the impact of the third-level digital divide, to better illuminate the influence of American Big Tech in shaping journalistic practices in the Arab region. The aim is to shed new light on an under-researched theme in the Arab region, and show that even if the first and second levels of the digital divide are mended, the third level of this divide keeps intact the imbalance of power between the Global North and the Global South.

Shaping the field – the first and second levels of the divide

As mentioned, the global digital divide refers to the unequal distribution of digital technologies and access to the internet, particularly between the Global North and Global South. Such a divide can significantly impact the journalism sector in the Global South, where journalists may not have access to the same tools and resources as their counterparts in developed countries, such as access to the same data and information resources as those in developed countries. Regionally, there are disparities among Arab countries, with a divide between oil-rich and well-connected states versus less advantaged countries whose access is more limited, although the average access rate in the region is still one of the highest in the world (ITU, 2022). Table 1 shows the Internet connectivity in the region which varies significantly among countries, with some GCC states having over 100% connectivity and Yemen having the lowest penetration rate of 26% (as of 2022). Internet access is not equally available across the region due to socioeconomic differences and high online data costs. Accessing 1 GB of data varies from country to country, with Yemen being the most expensive at US$15, and Qatar being the least expensive at US$12 (Capital.co.uk, 2021).

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Table 1.

Average % of penetration of Internet, among Arab populations in 2022.

Middle East	Average of, % Population (Penetration)
United Arab Emirates	121
Qatar	107
Bahrain	100
Kuwait	99
Saudi Arabia	98
Oman	95
Lebanon	84
Jordan	84
Palestine (State of)	75
Iraq	74
Syria	47
Yemen	27
Grand total	84.23

Also, in terms of mobile subscriptions, the Arab region is roughly divided into two groups where the first group consists of countries with high mobile subscription rates, including the Gulf States, Syria, Algeria, and Morocco. The second group includes countries with below-average rates, such as Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Palestine, Sudan, Jordan, Lebanon, and Yemen.

Generally, the region suffers from a lack of reliable and accurate data, partly because of a lack of financial and human resources available to Arab statistics agencies. As a result, data mining and data analytics are among the skills acutely needed in the region, which compels many agencies to seek collaboration with overseas partners to help upskill local staff (Lotfi, 2018: p. 6).

In the field of journalism, the digital divide is manifested in the differences in skills, education, and income that affect people’s ability to use and benefit from digital technologies (Van Dijk, 2020). There is generally a shortage of IT professionals and developers in Arab newsrooms with a mastery of digital applications (Al-Raji, 2020: p. 100). One recent study based on interviews in two state-owned newspapers in Egypt revealed that those assigned to develop Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality are seen as a small cohort of professional journalists with special technical skills to develop this kind of technology as required in the newsrooms. The study concluded that Egyptian newsrooms merely imitate the work undertaken in developed countries regardless of whether the output serves local audiences (Abdel Moati, 2020). In addition to these digital tools, journalists are also expected to master English, which has become the lingua franca of an increasingly technological world (Soussi, 2020).

The digital divide can also impact the business models of news organizations. In developed countries, many news organizations are moving towards digital subscription models and are relying on digital advertising for revenue (Newman, 2022). One solution for developing the Arab journalistic field, according to one journalist, is to encourage profit-driven news institutions which can raise funds, whether through users’ subscriptions or advertising, remote from the control of states or crony businessmen (personal communication, 28 August 2021). However, these business models may not be viable as most audiences prefer free services in Arabic, even if it means exposure to heavy advertising; audiences in poorer Arab states, for instance, tend to avoid paying for subscription-based content (Khalil and Zayani, 2021).

Thus, there is a disparity within newsrooms in the Arab region depending on the digital labor and funding available to them. There is also a disparity between Arab newsrooms and their counterparts in the Global North in terms of taking advantage of new tools, such as AI. What exacerbates the problem is the form of ‘digital nationalism’ illustrated in local digital training initiatives, usually targeting Gulf nationals rather than using united strategies to upskill the massive youth populations across the whole region (Mellor, 2023). This is coupled with the inconsistent funding provided by Western media donors to outlets in poorer Arab states, especially post-2011, which ultimately ended with the closure of many of these new outlets due to this unsustainable business model (Rammal, 2019: p. 105).

The above regional disparities are exacerbated by the global digital divide characterized by unequal power distribution and influence in the digital world such as issues of control, ownership, and governance of digital technologies and platforms. For instance, cyberspace is not an uncontrolled virtual notion; it is a system or network which is very much under the control of a few countries, particularly the USA (Mainwaring, 2020: p. 219). Moreover, this level of the digital divide reflects the dominance of a few corporations in the digital landscape, which has significant implications for journalism in the Global South. The following sections demonstrate this digital inequality and the dominance of Big Tech in the global ad market, and the dependence of Arab news outlets on digital ads (such as Google Ads) to drive traffic to their digital platforms forcing these outlets to depend mostly on shallow, clickbait content.

The power imbalance in the digital sphere – third-level divide

It is generally known that the decisions on digital standards and internet architecture are predominantly made by states and corporations in the Global North, which creates a divide among nations. The term ‘internet governance’ itself is misleading as it implies coordination between independent countries without an overarching political authority (Mueller, 2010: p. 8). However, current international initiatives such as the World Summit on Information Society and the Internet Governance Forum are not able to produce binding collective rules, having no power to enforce the implementation of such regulations.

In this context, the Arab region is vulnerable to the dominance of Western technology corporations that extract and analyze data on a large scale for profit (Coleman, 2019). This has led to global corporations controlling the digital infrastructure and continuing previous patterns of control in the offline sphere, leaving the less privileged marginalized. Thus, the digital sphere is similar to the offline sphere in terms of bureaucracy and serves as another example of the digital capabilities of the Global North, including surveillance technology. In this sphere, the United States is an information hegemon that shapes the current infrastructure, data transactions, and algorithms, leaving smaller states, particularly in the Global South, unable to keep up with developments in technology (Mainwaring, 2020: pp. 227–31).

Hosting content locally is another challenge in the Arab region, as only 5% of the content accessed is hosted within the region, while the majority is hosted abroad, which results in higher costs (Internet Society, 2017: p. 22). Additionally, there is a significant shortage of digital expertise in the region, leading to a reliance on foreign workers, primarily from the United States, to manage their digital projects.

Moreover, the percentage of social media users in the region is one of the highest in the world, with ca. 79% of Arab youth saying that they got their news from social media in 2021 (up from 25% in 2015); Egypt alone is the largest market for Facebook in the region (Radcliffe and Abuhmaid, 2021). Despite this high use of social media platforms, Arab governments as well as news media have limited control over global corporations such as Google, and it is unlikely that Big Tech will be required to alter their practices or pay additional taxes in the region. Such platforms act as powerful ‘digital intermediaries’, or digital middlemen, connecting different groups to facilitate transactions, communication, and other activities (Kleis and Ganter, 2017).

These digital intermediaries in the journalism industry act as new digital gatekeepers controlling access to information and deciding what content to promote or suppress (Kleis and Ganter, 2017). They use algorithms to curate and prioritize content, and these algorithms can prioritize sensationalist content over more nuanced reporting, as will be discussed below. Also, digital intermediaries collect vast amounts of user data, which they use to inform their algorithms and advertising models (Schmidt et al., 2019). Giblin and Doctorow (2022) argue that Big Tech like Google and Facebook monopolize the digital ad market, turning the creative and cultural markets into winner-takes-all markets where a few players reap the lion’s share of revenue and profits.

In the Arab region, news outlets are dependent on these digital intermediaries to reach their audiences and generate revenue through advertising, and this dependency can limit their ability to report on topics that may be unpopular. This implies that power dynamics from the offline world are replicated in the digital realm, as discussed in the following section.

The rise of clickbait content

Arab newsrooms are facing economic challenges that have led to fierce competition among digital outlets. In order to increase traffic to their websites, many Arab newsrooms rely on sensational headlines rather than focusing on informative news. To measure success, these newsrooms tend to prioritize social media metrics such as impressions, shares, and views, which reflect their ability to attract audiences in a crowded online market. As a result, Arab journalists increasingly use ‘clickbait’ headlines to draw attention to their articles (Ezz, 2021). According to one journalist, television channels prioritize social media views as a key metric of digital success and may entrust digital marketing professionals, rather than journalists, with social media strategies (Ezz, 2021: p. 58). Another journalist told me that likes and shares are usually triggered by short, snappy, and entertaining news (personal communication, 5 December 2021). This can lead to conflicts between journalists and marketers over what content to produce for digital platforms, leading marketers to pay Big Tech like Facebook to promote their sponsored content so as to increase views and likes on some channels (Ezz, 2021: p. 59).

In Yemen, social media sites such as Facebook have been the go-to source for updates on the development of the situation in the country, since the 2011 uprising. By the end of 2017, there were 258 outlets in Yemen: some were affiliated with the government and others with the Houthis (Mellor, 2021). This encouraged various news sites to subscribe to Google Ads as the most important revenue source, forcing those sites to compete among themselves to attract as many views as possible, to enable them to double their advertising revenue, even at the expense of providing serious and meaningful content (Khashafa, 2021). Google typically shares the profits with the publisher, based on the number of clicks Google Ads obtains. Thus, if a reader chooses not to click on any advertisement, the publisher will not receive any monetary gain. Due to this dependency on Google Ads, news sites have resorted to using sensational headlines to attract readers and boost traffic on their sites. One Yemeni editor, Amer Al-Dumaini, argued that Google Ads contributed to the deterioration of the Yemeni online press and the weakening of its content; this eventually led to declining confidence in the Yemeni journalistic content. Al-Doumaini said,

Google’s aim is purely commercial, and online journalistic sites have had to promote sensational content to draw attention to get the greatest number of visits, thus maximizing profits. The profession has turned into a means of livelihood and earning, instead of providing serious and professional content; consequently, many people from outside the journalism field have joined the profession in search of profit. We have witnessed the rise of dozens of news websites whose number has continuously multiplied, while the serious online press has remained in the hands of a few outlets (cited in Khashafa, 2021).

Another Yemeni web developer (cited in Khashafa, 2021) confirmed this trend, saying that,

There is a wave of news sites that pursue sensationalism in their headlines, and profit from Google Ads to the detriment of accuracy. Readers find sensationalist headlines and click on the links to the relevant news stories only to get fragmentary information.

The advantage for Google is to create more traffic on those sites for its advertisers, with the price per click ranging between US$0.01 and US$0.15 or even more, depending on the location of both advertisers and readers. This means that audiences in richer markets, particularly in Saudi Arabia, where the digital advertising spend is much higher than in poorer Arab states, are more valued than those in a poor country like Egypt, regardless of the high population in Egypt (personal communication, 1 December 2021). Nonetheless, digital advertising revenue, even in the wealthy GCC region, is not comparable to that in the USA, where advertisers spend relatively more, because most advertising revenues come from North America, and Facebook declared in its annual report in 2020 that approximately 47% of its advertising revenue comes from the USA and Canada.

The result is that audience metrics, centering on impressions, shares, and views, are used as a benchmark to gauge news outlets’ success in seizing audiences’ attention in a saturated and crowded media market. Other important measures, however, are relegated to the background including measuring the audience’s engaging with the news, commenting on it, and debating the information provided by news institutions, as well as raising concerns about potential biases in such news content. In such a market, publishers also do not push for debates about critical issues pertinent to the Arab digital media sphere such as the monopoly of the Big Tech corporations in the digital advertising market, the need for inclusive access to the digital sphere, and privacy regulations, among other topics.

In summary, American Tech Giants have not only defined the region’s digital technology, but also seized the lion’s share of the digital ad market to the detriment of Arab news outlets.

Why standing up to Big Tech is not an option

The current debate about digital technology tends to reiterate the traditional view of technology as an impartial force for prosperity and liberation, while celebrating the Western/American model as the baseline for the Arab region to follow. Such a view, however, overlooks the inequality in the digital sphere such as that illustrated in the distribution of digital advertising. So far, Arab states and newsrooms have been unable to negotiate with Big Tech as other Western countries, like Australia. For instance, in early 2021, the Australian government introduced new legislation to force Tech Giants such as Google and Facebook to pay local news media for the news feed circulated on their platforms. Google then rushed to strike deals with two major media companies in Australia to pay for their shared news (Cave, 2021).

In the Arab region, an Iraqi commentator described Mark Zuckerberg as the ‘Supreme Leader of Facebook’, alluding to his massive power in the global digital media sector, as he wrote that the Australian controversy raised many questions about the acceptable business models for news outlets while urging Arab media to define what they wanted from the Tech Giants (Nei’ma, 2021). The Australian case prompted many governments to ponder on a similar action to force the American Big Tech corporations to pay for local journalism; however, a similar action is unlikely to occur in the Arab region, as many states fear facing reduced services from the Big Tech giants such as Facebook.

This is particularly true given the limited role of Arab markets for Big Tech organizations like Facebook, which records nearly half of its revenue in North America (FB, 2020). This means that the corporation focuses its attention and investment on the American market, despite having much larger markets, in terms of users, in the Global South. In Arab newsrooms, therefore, new tools such as those based on AI for automatic summarization of information and reporting are usually developed in English, not Arabic. This is because Natural Language Processing (NLP) research in Arabic is still limited although the US dedicated some funding to Arabic NLP projects, after the 9/11 attacks (Darwish et al., 2021: pp. 74–5). There have been recent initiatives since the 2010s, with the launch of social media platforms and the use of social media analytics, but the main difficulty is that Arab users post in a variety of dialects (Ali et al., 2021: p. 127). This problem requires heavy investment in Arabic NLP, and the problem is exacerbated by the lack of digital talents in the Arab region, coupled with the unwillingness of some Big Tech companies to develop digital tools in the Arabic language since the bulk of their revenue is generated in North America.

Another challenge in the Arab region is the prevalence of digital and political rivalries among Arab states, which makes it difficult for Arab governments to unite around one set of demands concerning American Big Tech. For instance, there are some Arab states which have invested heavily in cyber-attacks and social media monitoring to help in their proxy wars and regional rivalries, although they have come to depend almost entirely on American technology and Western data scientists, due to the lack of digital talent in the region (DiResta and Miller, 2020).

Meanwhile, Arab media seem to have surrendered to the dominance of American Tech Giants which have doubled their profits while revenue from the Arab news market has declined. This has led to the axing of many newsrooms, especially those which have built their economic model on advertising revenue. These Tech Giants have transformed themselves into ‘a new dictator model which has a main say in editorial decisions, the definition of news content, and directing users’ behavior’ (Al-Sahafa, 2021: p. 3). Instead of developing ways to increase digital literacy, measuring the audience’s engagement with the news, inclusive access, or privacy regulations, Arab media outlets compete among themselves to get more clicks for a fraction of the digital advertising revenue.