March 28, 2019

Yasser Abdel-Aziz says eight trends will shape media in 2019

The second day of the Arab Media Forum 2019 hosted a session on key trends that are shaping media on 2019. Columnist and media expert Yasser Abdel-Aziz highlighted the most important developments affecting the media industry worldwide including the fourth industrial revolution, the deployment of artificial intelligence and use of social media platforms by individuals, media organisations and governments.

Kicking off his session, Abdel-Aziz drew attention to the role of social media in promoting not only violence and hate speech, but also promoting crime by live streaming terrorist attacks like in the case of the recent violence in Christchurch, New Zealand.

He expected the government to enforce more control over social media platforms. He said Japan has received a written request from Australia to arrange talks on tightening social media controls at the Group of 20 Summit in Osaka in June. He asserted that the alarming increase in hate speech on social media will encourage governments to establish a legal framework to tighten control on social media.

According to Yasser Abdel-Aziz, the second trend that will influence media this year is the increasing use of artificial intelligence. He said that Xin Xiaomeng, the lifelike robot news anchor that was used by China’s Xinhua news agency, triggered a wave in the Middle East and more Arab news agencies and TV channels are using robots and artificial intelligence.

Abdel-Aziz said the third trend is the deepfake, a technique for human image synthesis based on artificial intelligence. It is used to combine and superimpose existing images and videos onto source images or videos using a machine learning technique. He said researchers expect deepfake to threaten personal privacy in general.

He also said advertising on social media platforms is set to increase as per a report by Standard & Poor's. He said the adverting market will shift dramatically from TV to social media. Magna expects digital advertising to account for 50% of the total advertising market. Google and Facebook will continue controlling this growing market. He expected big media organisations to invest more in their social media platforms to attract more followers, in order to generate quick income from them.

Regarding governments’ use of social media, he said that social media has become an important government communication tool as it is a strategic tool to communicate with the public.