About

About TruthScore

We are building a public, auditable record of why a piece of news looks the way it does — independent of any publisher, free of advertising, and open about every scoring decision we make.

Mission

TruthScore's mission is media transparency. When a reader lands on a TruthScore page, they should be able to see exactly why a claim was scored the way it was, what evidence was weighed, and what the underlying methodology is — without paying, without signing in, and without trusting us on faith.

We hold ourselves to the same standard we hold the outlets we score. TruthScore is independent: we have no publisher relationships and no advertising. Every rating on the site links back to the public evidence that produced it. The scoring heuristic lives in source, not behind an opaque API; the moderation log is open on appeal; the live counter-consensus index names the rebuttals its cases are weighed against.

We do not claim to be neutral — neutrality on a fact is rarely the goal. We claim to be auditable: every score, every appeal, and every methodology change is a record a reader can retrace from the outside.

Methodology summary

The full methodology documents the 0 – 10 heuristic and the five daily signals. The summary below covers what the counter-consensus index uses to pull a public claim apart when it diverges from the official record: a four-axis breakdown evaluated on each piece that crosses the editorial desk.

Transparency
Who owns the outlet, who funds it, and what it discloses about itself.
Ownership, funding sources, editorial leadership, and any disclosure the outlet makes about its own conflicts. An outlet that names its funder, publishes its masthead, and links to corrections scores higher than one that does not.
Source diversity
How wide and how independent the cast of cited sources is — not how many there are.
A piece that leans on a single think-tank, two wire services, and a press release is more fragile than one that draws on independent reporters, primary documents, and named on-the-record witnesses. We weigh range and independence, not raw count.
Evidence quality
Primary versus secondary attribution, named witnesses, and verifiable links.
A claim backed by a transcript, a court filing, or a named on-the-record witness outranks one backed by "officials said." Every citation is checked for verifiability and for whether it carries the claim on its own.
Counterweight
How directly the piece engages with rebuttals, counter-evidence, and opposing views.
A piece that ignores the strongest rebuttal to its own thesis is weaker than one that names the rebuttal and weighs it. Counterweight is what separates a one-sided amplification from a defensible argument, even when the conclusion is right.

Together, the four axes are what produce the headline score on each counter-consensus verdict. They are deliberately orthogonal: a piece can score well on transparency and poorly on counterweight, and we want the reader to see that split rather than a single opaque number. The precise weighting and edge handling live on the full methodology page.

Read the full methodology

Team

The team roster will be published here. We are filling the seats on this page as each contributor signs off on the public disclosure we ask of them — name, role, and any prior outlets they have written for. Nothing goes on this page until a contributor has reviewed and approved their entry.

  • Editorial lead
    TBD
    Sets the editorial policy and runs the moderation appeals queue.
  • Engineering
    TBD
    Owns the scoring engine, the fetcher, and the public audit trail.
  • Outreach & partnerships
    TBD
    Works with outlets on disclosure updates and voter-fact-check submissions.
  • Governance / advisors
    TBD
    Independent advisors who review methodology changes before they ship.

Read the methodology

The four-axis breakdown above is the summary. The full heuristic, the band scale, and the source-disclosure categories live on the methodology page.

Open the methodology pageBack to the home page