Methodology

How sources are chosen, how outlets are labelled, how stories are tagged, and how to ask for a correction.

Source orientation labels

Labels describe an outlet's general editorial orientation as assessed by a cited methodology on a stated review date. They do not describe the accuracy of any individual article, and they are never used to infer whether a story is true. An article from an outlet labelled “Center-Left” is not itself classified; article-level labels are a separate field that stays empty unless a story has been reviewed on its own.

Orientation is a directional spectrum with five positions. Three further states are deliberately not points on that line:

• Left: Editorial line consistently toward the left of its national political spectrum.
• Center-Left: Editorial line leaning left of centre in its national context.
• Center: No consistent lean detected by the cited methodology.
• Center-Right: Editorial line leaning right of centre in its national context.
• Right: Editorial line consistently toward the right of its national political spectrum.
• Mixed / Varies: Orientation varies by section, author or period; no single position applies.
• Unrated: Not yet reviewed. Absence of a label says nothing about the outlet.
• Disputed: Credible sources disagree; see methodology and cited sources before relying on it.

Words like liberal and conservative mean different things in different countries, so they are stored as separate descriptive tags with the national context they apply to, never mapped onto the spectrum.

Label status and confidence

• Reviewed: Checked by a maintainer against the cited methodology on the review date.
• Provisional: Initial classification awaiting full review; treat with caution.
• Disputed: Under appeal or contested by credible sources.
• Unrated: No classification has been made.

Every rated label must cite a source URL and methodology; reviewed labels must carry a review date. Confidence (0–100%) expresses how strongly the cited evidence supports the label. Any label produced by an automated classifier is marked “machine-generated” and can never be shown as reviewed. Every change is kept in an append-only label history.

Source selection

Sources come from a curated registry recording publisher, country, primary language, feed URL, usage terms and label provenance. Only official RSS/Atom feeds or licensed APIs are used. Real publisher feeds start paused until their terms have been reviewed. Coverage is uneven across countries and languages, and the interface says so wherever it applies. See the source registry.

Country and sector tags

Tags are assigned by deterministic, versioned rules, and each tag records why it was applied:

• Source country: the outlet is based in that country.
• Feed default: the feed is a country- or topic-specific section.
• Text match: a country name appears in the headline or excerpt.
• Keyword rule / feed category: sector vocabulary or the publisher's own category matched.

Sectors (a story may carry several):

• Politics: Government, elections, legislation, diplomacy and public policy.
• Business & Economics: Markets, companies, trade, labour, prices and economic policy.
• Education: Schools, universities, research institutions and learning policy.
• Technology: Digital services, science-driven industry, telecoms and computing.
• Agriculture: Farming, food production, fisheries, land use and rural economies.
• History & Context: Background, anniversaries, heritage and long-running stories.
• Culture: Arts, literature, film, music, religion, sport and society.

Rule-based tags can be wrong. They are aids for filtering, not editorial judgements.

Time and language

The publisher's original timestamp is kept alongside a UTC-normalized time. When a feed gives no usable date, the time we first saw the story is used and marked as estimated. Languages are as declared by the publisher. Nothing is machine-translated.

Corrections, appeals and takedowns

• Label appeals: use “Report a label issue” on any outlet in the source registry. Appeals are reviewed against the cited methodology. While an appeal is open the label can be marked Disputed. The outcome is recorded in the label history.
• Publisher takedown: publishers may ask for their feed to be removed or for excerpts to be hidden. Operators pause the source and mark affected stories as removed. Removed stories disappear from every list and API.
• Factual errors in stories belong to the publisher. FreAlgo shows publisher updates on the next scheduled fetch.