ARCS Resolution

 Sponsors: Fox News, LA Times, Daily Mail, The Telegraph, Forbes, BBC, Al Jazeera, The Independent, The Washington Post

Signatories: CNN, MSNBC, Wall Street Journal, TMZ, AP, New York Times, BuzzFeed, Politico, the Financial Times, Huffington Post, the Guardian, Reuters

ARCS Plan: Awareness, Recommendations, Censorship Prevention, and Suggestions Plan

To the Press Corps, 

Defining ‘fake news’ as any report or information that has been proven to be false or is not based in fact, 

Recognizing ‘political bias’ as a corporation’s inclination to report news through a lens aligning with a political perspective,

Taking into account that ‘selection bias’ is being associated with research where the selection of participants isn’t random, 

Identifying ‘confirmation bias’ as a consumer’s tendency to seek out and perceive as credible news information that aligns with their political inclinations, 

Keeping in mind that allowing third party corporations such as AI companies to flag, not remove or censure, disinformation and misinformation but not political bias is acceptable

Acknowledging governments who utilize foreign disinformation campaigns, censuring their people and encouraging them to allow the unfiltered truth of their people to be shared

1. Necessitates the creation of a media literacy program developed by an Alliance of Press Corporations (APC); 

1. Invites media outlets stretching across the political spectrum to participate in the creation of a media literacy curriculum which: 

1. Encourages readers to form their own views on political topics through reading a variety of perspectives,

2. Makes readers aware of the presence of political bias in media using examples of articles on the same topic but with different political views,

3. Notes the importance of wording and diction in a journalist’s account of events and in the way readers digest information,

4. Identifies fake news and introduces students to common signs of fake news, 

5. Identifying signs of news satire and news parody, and giving examples of platforms that typically use news satire and news parody, 

6. Providing access to media bias charts, such as those from Ad Fontes and AllSides, but also explaining the possible downsides and things to be wary of for these charts, 

7. Emphasizes the importance of freedom of speech while acknowledging political bias, 

8. Includes media literacy resources from the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC),

2. Encourages press corporations to distribute the media literacy resource on their individual websites and requires members of the APC to do so, 

3. Offers this completed program to governments for use as a resource in public education, so that media and the government remain completely independent in this endeavor,

2. Requests a partnership with the UNAOC to construct guidelines for journalists to maintain impartiality, 

1. Amplifying the efforts of the UNAOC in past years to increase global media literacy,

2. Recommends, within the aforementioned guidelines, increased coverage of events  that do not favor the views of news outlets, 

3. Calls upon governments to avoid censorship of the press, preserving freedom of the press, 

1. Compels the United Nations to condemn government censorship of media, 

2. Reminds press corporations that while they cannot influence the policies of the government, they do have the ability to promote freedom of the press on an individual level, 

3. Promotes freedom of the press, even and especially in expressing potentially controversial critiques of the government without government censorship, 

4. Encourages press companies to evaluate the reliability of a source and methods for fact-checking, 

1. Establishes curriculum for journalists over topics such as:

1. The impact of their wording on a reader’s view of an issue, 

2. Checking with a variety of sources in order to accurately report events, 

4. Permits the flagging of disinformation on social media and in news sources online:

1. Recommends the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to find disinformation using techniques such as:

1. Machine learning and natural language processing in spam filters,

2. Neural network technology to evaluate authenticity of news, 

3. Comparative analysis to examine if facts line up across multiple sources, 

4. Deep-learning algorithms, 

5. Automated bot-spotting or bot-labeling, 

6. Stance detection, which allows for proper political opinion to exist without being flagged as disinformation as long as the opinion does not rely on fabricated facts or sources,

7. Partnering with already-established and trusted companies such as Meedan or Full Fact, 

2. Suggests going further by using existing algorithms to scan open-source databases and present a collation of proven facts on the topic:

1. These facts will be presented to journalists so that they can use them to write factually correct news

2. Streamlines the process so that flagging of disinformation still ultimately returns the power of correcting this news to press and media organizations

3. Providing funding to media and press to ensure that they have the resources to address and correct flagged news

3. Allowing consumers to appeal any classification their posts may receive on social media if they believe their information has unjustly been labeled as misinformation

1. A team of politically diverse fact-checkers, with people who fall on the left, center, and right sides of the political spectrum, would judge these appeals to prevent political bias in the outcomes of these appeals. 

4. Requests that countries surrounding Russia and Ukraine remain committed to spreading politically correct and factual information about the current humanitarian and political crisis in the respective countries.