Africa Pushes to Co-Own AI Used in News
The call at a Beijing media forum signals a governance fight over who builds the AI now reshaping journalism.
Updated on Nov. 5, 2026 in Artificial Intelligence
Viasen Soobramoney, CEO of IOL, delivered a keynote at the 2026 World Media Summit in Beijing, calling for Africa and the Global South to help shape artificial intelligence in media. The seventh edition of the summit, hosted by Xinhua News Agency with the Beijing Municipal Government, drew nearly 500 delegates from about 330 media organisations, think tanks, government institutions and international bodies in 112 countries and regions. This is a statement of position at a conference, not a deployed system or a policy outcome.
Why it matters
Soobramoney argued AI is already reshaping how news is gathered, translated, verified, produced and distributed, and named misinformation, deepfakes, algorithmic bias and concentration of technological power in a few global companies as core risks. His case centres on ownership and governance of AI tools, not just their use, and it reflects a broader push by Global South media voices to have a say in systems that have historically underrepresented African stories, languages and cultures.
The figures reported are attendance and representation counts for the seventh World Media Summit: nearly 500 delegates, about 330 organisations and delegates from 112 countries and regions. These measure the summit's reach, not the performance or deployment of any AI system discussed.
The players
IOL
IOL is a South African digital news publisher whose CEO Viasen Soobramoney gave the summit keynote.
Xinhua News Agency
Xinhua is China's state news agency, which hosts the World Media Summit with the Beijing Municipal Government.
The details
Soobramoney spoke in the session on AI+ and the Future of Global Communication Governance, under the summit's theme Media in the Intelligent Age: From Consensus to Action. His argument rests on two points: that AI systems used to gather, translate and distribute news should be developed and owned with African participation, and that training and deployment choices shape whose stories are visible. Algorithmic bias — systematic skew in model outputs that follows from the data and design choices behind a system — is one of the risks he raised.
Timeline
Thursday, November 5, 2026: Soobramoney delivers the keynote at the World Media Summit in Beijing.
The Tech Race
The summit positions AI-in-media governance as a contest over who builds and controls the systems, with African and Global South media voices arguing for a share of that development rather than only consuming tools built elsewhere. The source does not place this against a named competing AI program or product roadmap.
The keynote is a policy position and carries no immediate change to how news is produced or read. Its practical relevance is to readers and newsrooms in Africa and the Global South, whose stories and languages AI-driven news tools may or may not represent, though the source gives no timeline for any such change.
The takeaway
The trajectory to watch is whether the call for African and Global South ownership of AI in media produces concrete commitments in later summit sessions or in named partnerships. Track follow-up outputs from the seventh World Media Summit, since the source does not yet describe any.
Further reading
For the broader debate over how these systems are built and governed, see Artificial Intelligence.
Source note: This article includes information reported by IOL.
