How TruthVane works — and what it will never do

TruthVane doesn't write the news. It's the honest lens on top of it: it gathers how many outlets are covering a story, where they sit on the spectrum, how much they corroborate each other, and where one side has gone quiet. Then it gets out of the way and sends you to the original source.

The trust score, plainly

For every story covered by more than one outlet, TruthVane groups the coverage by distinct news organization (wire reprints can't manufacture agreement) and measures four things:

• Corroboration — how strongly independent outlets converge on the same facts. This is the backbone of the score.
• Tone — measured vs. absolutist/emotive language, read from the words themselves.
• Sourcing — how densely the reporting attributes its claims.
• Spread — how the covering outlets fall across left, center, and right.

The headline number blends corroboration, tone, and sourcing. It is a measure of how well-corroborated and carefully-reported a story is — deliberately not a verdict on truth.

The one thing we're honest about

Consensus is not truth. A story every outlet agrees on can still be wrong; a lone dissenting report can be right. TruthVane reports corroboration and disagreement — it never punishes a source for being an outlier, and it never claims to have adjudicated reality. It hands you the evidence and the spread; the judgment stays yours.

Bias bands are a starting point, not a verdict

Each outlet carries a left–right band (L / LC / C / RC / R) seeded from the public consensus of independent raters (AllSides, Media Bias/Fact Check, Ad Fontes). That band is only a prior — a hint. What actually scores a story is the live, cross-source signal on that specific story. When coverage is lopsided — a well-covered story that one side has almost entirely ignored — we flag it as a Blindspot, so you can see what your usual feed isn't showing you.

Your searches never leave your device

This is the part no other news site can say. TruthVane's search engine is compiled to WebAssembly and runs entirely in your browser. When you search, nothing is sent to a server, logged, or profiled. There is no tracking pixel, no ad network, no behavioral model of you — because there's nothing to build one from. Privacy here isn't a policy we promise; it's how the software is built.

The pledge

A tool that asks you to trust it owes you these in return. We will never:

• Run ads. Ad revenue rewards outrage and time-on-site. That incentive is the disease we're treating.
• Sell or share your data. We don't collect it in the first place.
• Optimize for engagement. Success is you leaving informed, not you doomscrolling.
• Paywall the honesty. Bias, spread, and blindspot signals stay free. TruthVane+ pays for depth and convenience — never for the truth itself.
• Hide our methods. A transparency tool that hides its own algorithm is a contradiction. Our engine and scoring are open.

How we make a living

Readers, not advertisers. A free tier anyone can use, an optional TruthVane+ subscription for power users, licensing of the trust engine to researchers and educators, and grants. If TruthVane earns your trust, a few dollars keeps it independent. That's the whole model — and it's the only one that doesn't corrupt the mission.