Corrections policy

We publish machine-produced analyses of contested questions, and those analyses name real organizations and real people. Sometimes we will get something wrong. This page says what to do about it.

Report an error

Write to corrections@housecarl.cloud.

Tell us the page, the specific statement you believe is wrong, and — if you can — what the correct position is and where it is documented. A link to a primary source is the fastest possible route to a fix.

You do not need to be the subject of the report to file a correction. If you are the subject, say so; those go to the front of the queue.

What we do

Acknowledge within 72 hours. A human reads it and replies. Not a form-letter autoresponder.

Resolve within 30 days, usually much sooner. One of four outcomes:

1. Correct it. We fix the error and the page carries a dated correction notice saying what changed. We do not silently edit and pretend the original never happened.
2. Annotate it. Where the disagreement is about interpretation rather than fact, we add your position to the page, attributed to you.
3. Withdraw it. If a report rests on a source that turns out to be wrong, the conclusion does not survive the source. We unpublish.
4. Explain why not. If we think the report is right, we say so and show our reasoning. You are entitled to disagree publicly and we will link to your response.

What counts as an error

We measure sources against what they say. We do not adjudicate the world, and we will not pretend to. That makes the scope of a correction narrow and specific — three categories we always act on, and one we do not.

Misrepresentation of a source. A misquoted figure, a claim attributed to the wrong source, a study described as saying something it does not say, a date or a name that is wrong. This is our error in the strictest sense: we said a source said something, and it did not. We fix these.

Miscomputation. If the fusion, the reliability weighting, or the temporal decay was computed wrongly, the verdict is wrong on our own terms. We fix these and say what changed.

Evidence about a source's reliability. A retraction, a correction issued by the source itself, or credible evidence that a source fabricated or materially misstated its data. This is not a disagreement with us — it is input to us, about the one thing we claim to measure. A system that weighs sources by reliability cannot coherently refuse to update when handed proof of unreliability. We re-run the investigation with the new evidence weighted in and republish with a dated correction notice, or withdraw the report if the conclusion does not survive its sources.

Disagreement with a verdict is not, by itself, an error. A verdict of "unsupported" means the cited evidence does not carry the claim — not that the claim is false. But if you think a source is missing, or a weighting is indefensible, tell us. A missing source is a real defect and we would like to know about it.

Shared investigations

Reports on this site are ours. Investigations published by users at /share/… are theirs — their sources, their reliability scores, their conclusions. They are marked for exclusion from search engines and carry no index permission from us.

Tell us anyway. We can and do unpublish a shared investigation, and a report about a named third party gets looked at whoever published it.

Why we do it this way

A published verdict about a named organization is worth nothing if we are not willing to be wrong about it in public. A correction is cheaper than an argument and considerably cheaper than a lawsuit, and a house that corrects quickly is one you can trust the rest of the time.