How Was It True works
What gets checked
Factual assertions about companies, products, markets and technology, said by an identifiable speaker, where the words can be quoted and linked. A claim has to be falsifiable in principle and settled by documents that already exist.
Not checked, at any evidence level: anything about a person’s character, conduct or motives; health and medical claims; elections and partisan politics; predictions; opinions and value judgements.
What counts as a source
Primary documents only: regulatory filings, official transcripts, government statistical series, court records, standards publications, peer-reviewed papers, and a company’s own publications about itself. Reporting on a source is not the source.
A claim needs two independentsuch sources. Independent means a different publisher, a different underlying document, and neither citing the other — so a company’s own filing and that same company’s press release count once, not twice.
There is one exception. A claim about a company’s own reported figures may rest on a single source when that source is a periodic report the company filed with a securities regulator — a 10-K, 10-Q, 20-F, 40-F, 8-K, 6-K or DEF 14A. Only the company knows its own quarterly revenue, so a second independent source for it does not exist. What makes one filing enough is not that the company said it twice; it is that named officers signed it under Sarbanes-Oxley, with liability attached. A press release is not eligible however similar its contents.
Quoted words, and why the wording is stated
An automatic caption track is how a claim is found. It is never the record that the claim was made. Caption models fail on exactly what this site checks — numbers, units, scale words and product names — and a mis-heard “800 million” published as “800” would be a false claim attributed by name to a real person. So every page says how its wording was established, and a claim whose wording has not been confirmed against a transcript, a document or the recording itself is not published.
The verdicts
- Supported
- The primary sources agree with the claim as stated.
- Unsupported
- The primary sources do not bear the claim out. This is a statement about the evidence, not about the speaker's knowledge or intent.
- Contested
- Qualifying primary sources genuinely conflict with each other. Both sides are shown.
- Missing context
- The claim is accurate as far as it goes, and a fact in the sources materially changes how it reads. That fact is quoted.
- Outdated
- The claim was supported when it was made and the sources have since moved. Both the then and the now are shown, with dates.
A verdict is a summary of the sources printed beneath it and nothing more. It is never a statement about what a speaker knew, meant or intended. There is no accuracy score for any speaker on this site, at any aggregation: the subject of a verdict is a claim, never a person.
Every claim pulled from a source is published, including the ones that check out. A site that published only the failures would be running an argument rather than a check.
Corrections
If a check is wrong, say so here. A report is treated as a defect in the pipeline, not as feedback: the claim comes down in the same change that fixes whatever let it through, and a page that was wrong and is now right says so, with the date.