Claim-check receipt

Read this before anything else

This is not a fact checker. We do not tell you whether a claim is true. We tell you whether the page you named literally says it. A stable page that says “the earth is flat” will come back supported for that claim, because the page does say it. That is a measurement of the document, not a judgement about the world.

One Claim Receipt, from the prototypelocal fixtures, not a live-web read

The row below is a real receipt from the prototype running on local fixtures. It is not a live-web read. The page it read is an in-code stand-in at https://news.example/acme, whose body is: Acme raised fifty million dollars in 2019. The round was led by two funds. The prototype clock printed the time. Two independent reads of that fixture agreed, byte for byte.

The same prototype run also returned contradicted for “the earth is flat” against a fixture that said the earth is not flat, and unknown twice: once because no single sentence stated the claim, once because the page changed between the two reads. Those don't-know answers were delivered and not charged.

What we actually do

Honestly, and in full:

• You give us a claim and a URL.We do not hunt for sources. If you do not already have a citation to check, this is not the right tool.
• We read the page, then we read it a second time.Two separate reads, no page-body cache in between. If the two fingerprints disagree, the answer is unknown. We do not retry until two reads happen to match.
• We look for one sentence that literally contains the claim.The words have to sit as an unbroken run inside one sentence. A paraphrase is unknown, not supported. That is deliberate.
• You get a sealed receipt.The verdict, the exact sentence, the sha256 fingerprint of the bytes we read, and the time we read them. A person emails it to you. Nothing dated arrives afterwards. This is a receipt, not a feed.

The three answers

• SupportedA sentence on the page states your claim, and both reads of the page came back identical. That sentence is on the receipt, with the fingerprint and the time.
• ContradictedA sentence on the page states the opposite of your claim (the same words with a negation), and both reads matched. Same receipt shape.
• UnknownAnything else: no matching sentence, a page that changed between reads, a block, a redirect, a file with no sentences, two sources that disagree. Delivered. Not charged.

What this is not

• Not a truth score.We certify that a source says a thing. We do not certify that the thing is so.
• Not a search engine.You name the URL. If you need us to find a source, we will not guess at one.
• Not a live checker on this page.There is no paste box here. Email is the door until a public checker exists.
• Not a subscription.Credits are spent on decided checks. They are not a monthly file and there is nothing to cancel.