Relity does not judge whether a claim is true. It measures one thing: how long a claim sits before independent newsrooms carry it, and the moment that changes. This page is the whole method. If a number on this site looks wrong to you, this is where to check our working.
A fixed, public list. Here it is, in full, as the running site holds it right now:
BBC · Sky · NPR · Guardian · Al Jazeera · CBS News · NBC News · ABC News · CNN · Fox News · Axios · The Hill · CNBC · France 24 · Euronews · ABC Australia · NDTV · Nature
That is 18 independent newsrooms, from 21 feeds — the difference is that BBC and BBC Sport are one newsroom, not two, and the same goes for Sky and the Guardian. Feeds are de-duplicated to their publisher before anything is counted, so a story carried by BBC News and BBC Sport counts once. It has to: the entire claim we make is about independence, and a company agreeing with itself is not corroboration.
We do not have Reuters or AP. Their public feeds are no longer available to us, and listing them because they sound authoritative would be a lie about our own coverage. If a story runs on the wires and nowhere else, Relity will not see it.
The outlet published a story that our clustering matched to the same event. Clustering is by headline and body similarity, not by anyone's judgment. Two or more independent newsrooms is the threshold — that is the line, chosen in advance and applied identically to everything.
The count is cumulative: every distinct newsroom that has carried the story at any point since we started watching, not the number carrying it at this second. Our feed is a rolling window, so a story's live count falls as older articles age out of it — but a story that reached six newsrooms yesterday has still reached six. The number can only go up, and a crossing can never un-happen.
When we first see the story, not when it was published — we cannot honestly claim to know the second thing. Every reading is timestamped.
Two numbers, both real. We re-read every newsroom's feed every 4 minutes, and we re-check every watched name every 2 minutes. So the worst case between a story appearing in a newsroom's own feed and an alert leaving our server is about 6 minutes, and the typical case is under half that.
What we cannot tell you is how long the newsroom sat on it before publishing, or how long its feed took to update. Those are minutes we never see, and we do not pretend to. Every gap on this site is measured from our first sighting, which is a floor, not a boast.
If a story was already carried by two or more newsrooms the first time we saw it, its time-to-corroborate is recorded as unknown — never zero. We arrived late; that is not the same as it crossing instantly. Those stories are excluded from every average and every track record. A median polluted by late arrivals would be worthless, and the median is the entire point.
It is not proof. Breadth of reporting is not truth — newsrooms have been wrong together before, and a story carried by nobody can still be real. A short gap means a claim was corroborated quickly. It does not mean it was correct. Evidence, not verdicts, applies here exactly as it does everywhere else on this site.
Scheduled announcements. If you know a central bank speaks at 2pm, you do not need a detector — you need a wire, and ours is slower than one by design. We deliberately wait for a second independent newsroom, and that wait is the whole point for someone deciding whether to respond to a rumour and a disqualifier for someone trading the release. Relity is not a market data feed and should not be used as one.
Anything measured in seconds. See the numbers above. We are minutes, not milliseconds.
Stories the press never touches. A claim can be true and important and carried by nobody on our list. Silence here is a measurement of the newsrooms, not of reality.
Very broad subjects. Watching a term like a whole country or a head of state will match something most days, and an alert that fires constantly is one you stop reading. We now say so before you set one up.
Where it is the right tool: an unscheduled claim about a named thing, where the question is whether it has left social media and become press, and where you will later be asked how long you knew.
If we have a story wrong, tell us and we will fix the record and say that we did. Contact →