UAE and Saudi Arabia lead Arab nations in 2022 Global Soft Power Index

Expo 2020 Dubai has been hailed as a model of soft power. (Shutterstock)
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Updated 17 March 2022
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UAE and Saudi Arabia lead Arab nations in 2022 Global Soft Power Index

  • Saudi Arabia comes in second place among Arab states, making notable improvement in its Global Soft Power Index score
  • By embracing innovations and sound business practices, 13 MENA countries featured in the 2022 Brand Finance Global index

LONDON: The UAE and Saudi Arabia have emerged as the leading Arab nations in the 2022 Brand Finance Global Soft Power Index, which was inaugurated at the Global Soft Power Summit in London on Tuesday.

Soft power practitioners and researchers came together at the forum to launch the Global Soft Power Index, the world’s most comprehensive study on perceptions of nations as brands.

Of the 13 Arab countries featured in this year’s index, the UAE ranked 15th, the highest position for any nation brand in the Middle East and North Africa.

Saudi Arabia came second among Arab nations with a global ranking of 24, maintaining last year’s position, but with a notable improvement in its index score, which climbed to 47.1 out of 100.




Saudi Arabia came second among Arab nations with a global ranking of 24, maintaining last year’s position. (Supplied)

Globally, the US bounced back to first place this year, recovering from a major deterioration in its public perception in late 2020 and 2021, while the UK also moved up to second after overcoming the the fallout from COVID-19 and the Brexit debate.

According to Andrew Campbell, managing director of Brand Finance Middle East, the new rankings show that Saudi brands are growing and leading right across the Middle East.

“Each of the major Saudi brands is working toward Vision 2030 in its respective sector, recording impressive growth,” he told Arab News.

“Ma’aden is the fastest-growing brand in the entire region and Saudi brands across different industries are making their mark. These include Saudia Airlines, the Middle East’s fastest-growing airline brand this year.”

Indeed, Saudi Arabia has made soft power and nation branding key priorities in its Vision 2030 social and economic reform agenda.
 




King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Center (KSRelief) is a key international aid brand. (SPA)

The Kingdom is considered the center of the Arab, Islamic and international energy world, imbued with a rich history and culture. By promoting these qualities, it has used soft power as part of its foreign policy strategy for many years.

Meanwhile, in the UAE, exhibitions such as Expo 2020 Dubai have been used to cement the country’s role as a global soft power, and as a tool to connect nations and build bridges through innovation and inspiration.

Speaking at the Global Soft Power Summit, Sarah bint Yousef Al-Amiri, UAE minister for advanced technology and chair of the UAE Space Agency, said that her country claimed its place in the index by embracing change.

“It’s not by chance that the UAE is the strongest from a soft power perspective in the Middle East and North Africa. It is due to complete dedication and evolution, and embracing change and embracing innovation.”

The UAE also recognizes “the importance of leading, not by dictating what is right and wrong, and what form of governance is right and wrong,” she said.

Instead, it leads by “demonstrating how you create opportunities, leading by demonstrating how you create change, leading by demonstrating how you build growth within your own nation.”

Index scores were determined through a range of metrics across seven fields: Business and trade, governance, international relations, culture and heritage, media and communication, education and science, and people and values.

The Brand Finance Index also added a special metric to measure how nations responded to the challenges of COVID-19.

Soft power, a term coined by US political scientist Joseph Nye in 1990, is defined as the ability to obtain preferred outcomes by attraction rather than through coercion or payment.
 

Nye argued that there is an alternative tool of foreign policy for states to win the support of others. Instead of the traditional hard power approach, which relies on military and economic means, soft power, achieved through shared values and norms, can be utilized to appeal to states rather than coerce them.

“Soft power will reduce some of the future needs for hard power and, ultimately, should lead to more peace and prosperity,” Scott McDonald, CEO of the British Council, told the London summit in his opening remarks.




The Global Soft Power Summit was held in London on March 15, 2022. (Supplied)

According to the 2022 Global Soft Power Index, the UAE performed best on the business and trade pillar, ranking among the top 10 globally. It came fourth for being “easy to do business in and with,” and ranked eighth for being a “strong and stable economy.”

Performing well on a variety of other metrics, the UAE made the most rapid improvement this year in education and science. The UAE’s focus on high-tech industries and its leap into space exploration with the Emirates Mars Mission are likely to have influenced its score in this field.

“Innovation for us is not a choice,” Al-Amiri told Arab News. “It is actually an imperative mechanism of development, just by the fact that five decades ago, we didn’t have access to basic education, basic infrastructure, or any of the ways of modern life that we have today.”

In that time, the UAE has “transitioned from a country that has focused entirely on building infrastructure, because that didn’t exist, to a nation that is building what I call the intangible infrastructure that is based on talent and on the utilization of science and technology, that utilizes research and development as the engine of economic growth and sustained economic growth,” she added.

The UAE is also emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic stronger than before, with its trade and investment accomplishments underscored by the success of Expo 2020 Dubai.

However, embracing change and innovation does not mean the UAE has lost sight of its authentic character. Instead, the nation has allowed its identity to develop in tandem with its economic diversification.




Brands such as Saudia Airlines have played a role in building Saudi Arabia’s national brand. (Supplied)

“We have no problem looking retrospectively with regards to culture, with regards to values, understanding what works, understanding what needs to continue to evolve and develop it moving forward,” Al-Amiri said.

“We are about understanding and appreciating the differences between people. Legislations are there, but never set in stone.”

Besides the UAE and Saudi Arabia, 11 other Arab nations were included in this year’s Global Soft Power Index.

Qatar, Egypt, Kuwait, and Morocco ranked third, fourth, fifth and sixth, respectively, followed by Oman, Jordan, Bahrain, Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon and Iraq ranked from seventh to 13th.


Asharq News’ Nabeel Alkhatib receives lifetime achievement honor at May Chidiac Foundation Media Awards

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Asharq News’ Nabeel Alkhatib receives lifetime achievement honor at May Chidiac Foundation Media Awards

  • Alkhatib is renowned Palestinian broadcaster, media entrepreneur
  • The MCF recognizes the work of Arab, international media figures

DUBAI: Renowned Palestinian broadcast journalist and entrepreneur, Dr. Nabeel Alkhatib, has received a major honor at the May Chidiac Foundation Media Awards.

Alkhatib, general manager of Asharq News, received the Antoine Choueiri’s Special Tribute for Lifetime Achievement Award during a ceremony held in Dubai’s Al-Habtoor City on Wednesday.

Ali Jaber, chief content officer of MBC and Shahid, took the MCF Special Recognition for Pioneering Leadership in the Media Industry Award.

Sarah Dundarawy, a Saudi Arabia journalist and presenter at Al Arabiya, received the Outstanding Media Performance award.

In its third edition in Dubai, the MCF recognized the work of distinguished Arab and international media figures.

Mina Al-Oraibi, editor-in-chief of The National, took the Excellence in Media Award.

The Exceptional Courage in Journalism Award for Life Sacrifices went to the late Marie Colvin, an American war correspondent for the Sunday Times, who was killed while covering the siege of Homs in Syria in 2012.

Pascale Bourgaux, a war reporter, author and filmmaker, received the Engaged Journalist Award.

The Vision in Content Development Award went to the Dubai-based BLINX, the first digital-native storytelling hub in the Middle East and North Africa.

Founded by journalist and former Lebanese Minister for Administrative Development May Chidiac, the foundation is a nonprofit organization.

It is dedicated to research and development in various media fields, including international affairs, women’s rights, democracy and social welfare.

It is also aimed at establishing Lebanon as a proactive player in the Middle East and global economy.


Apple’s plan to offer AI search options on Safari a blow to Google dominance

Updated 08 May 2025
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Apple’s plan to offer AI search options on Safari a blow to Google dominance

  • Apple could add OpenAI, Perplexity as future search options
  • The news slammed shares of Google-parent Alphabet, wiping off roughly $150 billion from its market value

Apple’s plans to add AI-powered search options to its Safari browser are a big blow to Google, whose lucrative advertising business relies significantly on iPhone customers using its search engine.
The news slammed shares of Google-parent Alphabet, which closed down 7.3 percent, wiping off roughly $150 billion from its market value.
The iPhone maker was “actively looking at” reshaping Safari, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters, citing Apple executive Eddy Cue who was offering testimony at an antitrust case on Wednesday over Google’s dominance in online search.
Cue said searches on Safari fell for the first time last month due to users increasingly turning to AI, according to the source. Apple stock closed down 1.1 percent.
Google said that it continued to see growth in the overall number of search queries, including “total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platforms,” according to a statement posted on the company’s blog.
“People are seeing that Google Search is more useful for more of their queries — and they’re accessing it for new things and in new ways,” the company wrote.
Google cited voice and visual search features as contributors to total search volume growth. It was unclear whether Cue was using the same basis of comparison in his testimony when analizing types of searches.
Still, the Apple executive’s comments suggests that a seismic shift in search is likely underway, threatening Google’s dominant search business — a go-to advertising destination for marketers that has now become a target for US antitrust regulators, which filed two major lawsuits against the company.
Google is the default search engine on Apple’s browser, a coveted position for which it pays the iPhone maker roughly $20 billion a year, or about 36 percent of its search advertising revenue generated through the Safari browser, analysts have estimated.
Banning Google from paying companies to be the default search engine is among the remedies that the US Justice Department has proposed to break up its dominance in online search.
“The loss of exclusivity at Apple should have very severe consequences for Google even if there are no further measures,” D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria said.
“Many advertisers have all of their search advertising with Google because it is practically a monopoly with almost 90 percent share. If there were other viable alternatives for search, many advertisers could move much of their ad budgets away from Google,” Luria said.
Google is not defenseless.
Written off as an also-ran in the AI race by critics after ChatGPT’s buzzy launch in late 2022, Google has reached into its deep pockets to fund its AI efforts and leverage its vast data trove.
The company introduced an “AI mode” on its search page earlier this year, looking to retain its millions of users from going away to other AI models.
It recently expanded AI Overviews — summaries that appear atop the traditional hyperlinks to relevant webpages on a search query — for users in more than 100 countries, and added advertisements to feature, boosting Search ad sales.
CEO Sundar Pichai said in a testimony at an antitrust trial last month that Google hopes to enter an agreement with Apple by the middle of this year to include its Gemini AI technology on new phones.
Apple’s Cue on Wednesday also said the company would add AI search providers, including OpenAI and Perplexity AI, as search options in the future, Bloomberg reported.
“(Apple’s plan) also shows how far generative search sites, such as ChatGPT and Perplexity have come,” said Yory Wurmser, principal analyst for advertising, media & technology at eMarketer.
That Google is willing to pay tens of billions of dollars to remain the default search engine shows how crucial the agreements are, Wurmser said.
For instance, ChatGPT in April reported seeing over 1 billion weekly web searches for its search feature. It has more than 400 million weekly active users, as of February


Meta blocks access to Muslim news page in India

Updated 08 May 2025
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Meta blocks access to Muslim news page in India

  • The affected Instagram account, @Muslim, has a page with 6.7 million followers
  • Meta blocked the account by legal request of the Indian government, says founder

WASHINGTON: Meta has banned a prominent Muslim news page on Instagram in India at the government’s request, the account’s founder said Wednesday, denouncing the move as “censorship” as hostilities escalate between India and Pakistan.
Instagram users in India trying to access posts from the handle @Muslim — a page with 6.7 million followers — were met with a message stating: “Account not available in India. This is because we complied with a legal request to restrict this content.”
There was no immediate reaction from the Indian government on the ban, which comes after access was blocked to the social media accounts of Pakistani actors and cricketers.
“I received hundreds of messages, emails and comments from our followers in India, that they cannot access our account,” Ameer Al-Khatahtbeh, the news account’s founder and editor-in-chief, said in a statement.
“Meta has blocked the @Muslim account by legal request of the Indian government. This is censorship.”
Meta declined to comment. A spokesman for the tech giant directed AFP to a company webpage outlining its policy for restricting content when governments believe material on its platforms goes “against local law.”
The development, first reported by the US tech journalist Taylor Lorenz’ outlet User Magazine, comes in the wake of the worst violence between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan in two decades.
Both countries have exchanged heavy artillery fire along their contested frontier, after New Delhi launched deadly missile strikes on its arch-rival.
At least 43 deaths were reported in the fighting, which came two weeks after New Delhi blamed Islamabad for backing a deadly attack on tourists in the Indian-run side of the disputed Muslim-majority region of Kashmir.
Pakistan rejects the charge and has warned it will “avenge” those killed by Indian air strikes.
The @Muslim account is among the most followed Muslim news sources on Instagram. Khatahtbeh apologized to followers in India, adding: “When platforms and countries try to silence media, it tells us that we are doing our job in holding those in power accountable.”
“We will continue to document the truth and stand out firmly for justice,” he added, while calling on Meta to reinstate the account in India.
India has also banned more than a dozen Pakistani YouTube channels for allegedly spreading “provocative” content, including Pakistani news outlets.
In recent days, access to the Instagram account of Pakistan’s former prime minister and cricket captain Imran Khan has also been blocked in India.
Pakistani Bollywood movie regulars Fawad Khan and Atif Aslam were also off limits in India, as well as a wide range of cricketers — including star batters Babar Azam and Mohammad Rizwan and retired players Shahid Afridi and Wasim Akram.
Rising hostilities between the South Asian neighbors have also unleashed an avalanche of online misinformation, with social media users circulating everything from deepfake videos to outdated images from unrelated conflicts, falsely linking them to the Indian strikes.
On Wednesday, US President Donald Trump called for India and Pakistan to immediately halt their fighting, and offered to help end the violence.
 


Netflix announces major revamp of app homepage

Updated 07 May 2025
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Netflix announces major revamp of app homepage

  • Redesign features enhanced personalization and improved recommendations, as well as vertical videos on mobile devices

DUBAI: Streaming giant Netflix will begin rolling out a major revamp of its TV app’s homepage next week.

The new design “is simpler, more intuitive, and better represents the breadth of entertainment on Netflix today,” the company’s chief product officer, Eunice Kim, said on Tuesday.

It includes a navigation bar at the top of the screen, rather than the current position on the left, and more-responsive recommendations while a user browses the app.

Netflix’s chief technology officer Elizabeth Stone said that in making these recommendations the service “will pull in more signals,” such as search history and the trailers watched by a user.

“And because everything will happen seamlessly in the background, you won’t even notice it happening — it will just be magically easier to find something to watch,” she added.

The overall design will be more minimalist and cleaner, providing all the relevant information about a title in one place so as to reduce “eye gymnastics” and help users make an “informed choice,” Kim said.

The mobile app is also getting an overhaul, as Netflix tests the use of the favored video format on social media: vertical viewing. The vertical feed will feature clips from movies and TV shows that users can browse and then click on to visit to a title’s home page.

Netflix has previously used artificial intelligence technology across the platform for features such as recommendations but now, with advances in generative AI, it aims to go a step further by showcasing titles in more languages and including chatbot-like functionality.

For example, viewers can use conversational phrases such as “I want to watch something scary but not too scary” to search for content.

“Believe it or not, that search phrase will actually yield results in the new experience,” said Stone.

The company is also investing further in its content-delivery network, Open Connect, which optimizes streaming globally across differing internet speeds.

“Open Connect has given us a really strong foundation and now we’re building on that foundation as we deliver a broader and more complex variety of entertainment, including live events and games on TV,” Stone said.

“Entertaining the world is hard but technology makes it easier.”


Bill Gates says AI key for health, education innovation

Updated 07 May 2025
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Bill Gates says AI key for health, education innovation

  • Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said artificial intelligence will play a key role in unlocking new tools for health, education and agriculture at a meeting with Indonesia's president on Wednesday

JAKARTA: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said artificial intelligence will play a key role in unlocking new tools for health, education and agriculture at a meeting with Indonesia's president on Wednesday.
Indonesia is Southeast Asia's biggest economy and has a population of around 280 million across its sprawling archipelago, with a growing demand for data centres and AI tech in the region.
Gates visited President Prabowo Subianto and Indonesian philanthropists in the capital Jakarta, where he spoke about his optimism that AI-driven innovation will help tackle global challenges.
"AI is going to help us discover new tools. And even in the delivery of health and education and agriculture advice, we'll be using AI," he told a meeting.
"Once we finish (eradicting) polio, we'd like to try and eradicate measles and malaria as well. We have some new tools for that. And of course, part of my optimism about the innovation is because we have now artificial intelligence."
UN agencies have been campaigning for four decades to eradicate polio, most often spread through sewage and contaminated water.
The billionaire philanthropist has donated more than $159 million to Indonesia since 2009, mostly to the health sector including to fund vaccines, Prabowo said.
Gates later visited an elementary school in Jakarta alongside Prabowo to see students having free meals as part of a programme launched by the Indonesian leader.
Prabowo also announced plans to give Gates Indonesia's highest civilian award for his "contribution to the Indonesian people and the world".
Microsoft chief executive officer Satya Nadella last year pledged a $1.7 billion investment in AI and cloud computing to help develop Indonesia's AI infrastructure.