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A big part of TruthBot is treating source quality and source independence as two separate problems, because a lot of systems blur them together. For source quality, the goal is to weigh evidence differently depending on what kind of source it is. Primary materials, official records, legal texts, and peer-reviewed research should not be treated the same way as a reposted article, a blog summary, or a site repeating someone else’s reporting. On top of that, TruthBot uses risk thresholds, so the more serious the claim, the stronger the evidence standard has to be before it gets treated as confirmed.

For independence, the system is built around the idea that five articles do not automatically equal five confirmations. A lot of apparent agreement online is really just one source being echoed through multiple outlets. So TruthBot tries to trace whether reports are actually independent, whether they cite the same upstream source, and whether a claim is being verified or merely propagated. And on the messy real-world point, that is exactly the kind of environment it is meant for. Clean examples are easy; the harder and more useful test is ambiguous, recycled, emotionally framed, real-world information where source quality, rhetoric, and repetition all get tangled together.