Digital Economy and Remote Work Applications, with the purpose of “enhancing the government performance by investing the latest technologies and tools of artificial intelligence and applying them in various sectors” (UAE Cabinet n.d.). In that same year, the country developed its Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2031.33 • Saudi Arabia is the first country to grant citizenship to a robot. In 2019, the country also founded the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA).34 • Qatar has developed a national strategy on AI (Ministry of Transport 2020). • In 2019, the Egyptian government established the National Council for Artificial Intelligence.35 The 2020 Government AI Readiness Index, issued by Oxford Insights and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), includes 172 countries. The UAE ranked 16th, Qatar and Saudi Arabia 37th and 38th respectively, Bahrain 43rd, Oman 48th, Kuwait 54th, Egypt 56th, Jordan 79th, and Morocco 99th. The ranking of other Arab countries was above 100, with Syria and Yemen occupying the last two slots (Oxford Insights 2020). Moreover, according to the Global AI Index issued by Tortoise Media, out of 62 countries Saudi Arabia ranked 20th, while the UAE ranked 33rd, Qatar 45th, Bahrain 52nd, Tunisia 55th, Morocco 56th, and Egypt 60th (Tortoise Media n.d.). In 2018, a report by PriceWaterhouse-Coopers) predicted that by 2030 AI will contribute 320 billion US dollars to the economy in the Middle East—that is, the equivalent of 11 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) (PwC 2018). The above shows that certain Arab countries, especially those in the Gulf region, are gradually making headway in the field of AI, while others, such as Lebanon, Sudan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, are still behind. However, the question is: What has been done so far in the Arab region in terms of implementing AI and technology to combat mis- and disinformation? It is obvious that not much progress has been made so far and that the region is still lagging behind in this area. We were able to locate very few initiatives and organizations that use AI to combat disinformation. Two of these are discussed in the subsections that follow. It is important to generate tools that can help detect rumors and fake news and analyze Arabic content. This would save time and money, especially since false and misleading information spreads very fast, while checking information manually is time-consuming. I N FO R M ATI O N D I SO R D ER IN THE GLOBA L SOUTH 8.1 TANBIH, QATAR Tanbih is a platform developed in 2019 by the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) of Hamad Bin Khalifa University.36 It detects and analyzes misand disinformation by using AI and deep neural networks. The platform is a news aggregation portal and relies on a series of data-driven analytics to present profiles on media trends. It attempts to discover important information about the position of the media, its centrality, extreme biases, and directions. The news aggregation department primarily collates and analyzes articles that fall into certain themes. Through analysis, the platform arrives at the number of accurate and inaccurate pieces of information. The platform also has another project about advertising and methods of persuasion.37 The user sends a piece of text and the corresponding link, and then views the results of the analysis to determine the methods of persuasion used and the misleading elements in the text. In addition to general users, journalists working for Al Jazeera English use the tool to ensure that their material is free from persuasion tactics. Shadin Sha’ar, a research assistant at QCRI and part of the small team that worked on developing the platform, said that the platform registers only fifteen entries per day and that only four institutions use its application programming interface (API),38 examples being institutions affiliated with the UK Parliament and with Al Jazeera English. Sha’ar stressed that the institute seeks to “make these tools user-friendly” and to introduce them to a wider public (interview, June 2021). Most of Tanbih’s work so far has been in English. The QCRI aims to develop special tools that support Arabic. According to Sha’ar, the most significant obstacle is the lack of sources and databases in Arabic. Reputable organizations that can be relied upon in collecting verified information operate in English. It is difficult to obtain data in Arabic, and collecting these data for building models and tools takes a long time.39 Middle East and North Africa – 56