Methodology

How IFFA works, and where it is weak

IFFA is designed to encourage verification rather than demand trust. Nothing below is hidden or hand-waved. No language model runs in the deployed build.

Six things IFFA never conflates
  • Bias ≠ falsehood

    A politically aligned article can be accurate; a neutral-looking one can be wrong.

  • Coverage asymmetry ≠ falsehood

    A blindspot is a fact about coverage, not about whether the story is true.

  • Source reliability ≠ article truth

    A publisher's record does not decide any individual claim.

  • Official source ≠ automatic truth

    A press release is evidence that an institution stated X — not that X is true.

  • Forum consensus ≠ evidence

    Discourse is never counted as independent factual corroboration.

  • Correlation ≠ editorial motive

    Observed coverage describes what was published, not a newsroom's intent.

The documents
  • Media Landscape Intelligence

    Ownership, external ratings, observed alignment, selection/framing/stance, blindspots, the claim evidence matrix, discourse handling — and the six things IFFA never conflates.

  • Pipeline methodology

    Ingestion, geo-classification, crisis priority — the base pipeline and its weaknesses.

  • Editorial priority model

    How stories are ranked for prominence. A ranking score — not a probability of truth.

  • Event identity

    How reports are grouped into one story, and split when they are different events.

  • Claim confidence

    The frozen claim engine — corroboration, contradiction, primary evidence, corrections.

  • Trend model

    What is changing and consequential — the eight sub-scores.

  • Quality dashboard

    Every evaluation IFFA runs, with its numbers — including the honest first-pass figures and known limits.

  • Worked examples

    Real clusters annotated end-to-end.