The Aporia is an independent analysis layer over the news. It collects reporting from different publishers, connects coverage of the same events, and examines each account using the same set of measurements.
The purpose is simple: to make it easier to see how different accounts of the same event relate to one another.
You can see what sources agree on, where they differ, what they emphasise, and what they leave out, without reading through dozens of articles and trying to piece the comparison together yourself.
The Aporia does not decide which account is correct. It shows you the material, explains how its measurements were produced, and leaves the judgment to you.
Every measurement has a defined methodology. The limitations are documented. The original articles remain reachable, because every article here links out to the publisher that wrote it. Where the system is uncertain, that uncertainty is shown rather than rounded away.
The Aporia is run in the open, because a tool that asks you to weigh up other people's motives has to be legible about its own.
The Aporia produces no reporting of its own. It employs no reporters and breaks no stories. It collects reporting from different publishers and organises it around the events being reported, and when several outlets cover the same event, those articles are treated as different accounts of the same thing rather than as unrelated pieces of content.
Each account is then examined using the same set of measurements: the certainty of its claims, the amount of hedging in its language, its position on a left-to-right scale, its framing of the story, and the publisher's history of detected corrections.
Those measurements are not a verdict on the article. They are there to make the differences between accounts easier to see.
The result is a different way of reading the news. Instead of opening one article and taking its framing as the starting point, you can begin with the event itself and see how different sources chose to describe it. The Aporia is not a replacement for reporting. It is a way of examining reporting.
The Aporia starts with the event rather than the article. Articles arrive from 53 feeds as they are published, and the ones describing the same real-world event are brought together so that the coverage can be examined as a whole. You move between the individual accounts and the event they describe, instead of having to work out the relationship between those articles yourself.
Each account is then measured against the same fixed questions:
Every figure is produced the same way for every source, so two outlets covering one event can be set against each other on equal terms. The measurements are there to give you more to examine, not fewer things to think about.
If two outlets describe the same event differently, The Aporia does not choose between them. It lets you see the difference, examine the underlying articles, and decide what you make of it. It does not rule on whether a story is true: it is not a fact-checker, it never republishes an article's text, and every score here is an automated judgment rather than a statement of fact. Every article stays linked to the original it came from.
The point is not to replace your judgment. It is to give your judgment better material to work with.
The Aporia is for people who occasionally want to go deeper than the news usually allows. You might recognise yourself here if:
Come here when something catches your attention and you decide it is worth investigating properly.
The Aporia is not meant to replace the way you normally keep up with the news, and it is worse than a normal news app at the two-minute catch-up. There is no feed, nothing is ordered by what will hold your attention, and the site will not tell you which account is the correct one. What it does is put the accounts beside each other with the same measurements on each, and leave the judgment with you.
Most people now meet the news through a feed, and a feed is ranked to hold attention. The most dependable way to hold someone's attention is to show them more of what they already agree with. The problem that creates is subtler than anyone being lied to. Over time the range of what a reader sees narrows, until the disagreement on the other side of it looks smaller and less considered than it actually is. Political extremism has many causes, and this is the one a tool can do something about, so it is the one The Aporia is aimed at.
Most people want broadly similar things and disagree about how to get them. Politics is largely the argument about how, and that argument is genuinely difficult, which is not the impression a ranked feed leaves. A test I keep returning to is that if you cannot name a single good thing about a position, you probably do not yet understand it. That is a statement about understanding rather than about agreement. You can meet it and still think the position is wrong.
The other thing I keep returning to is that the order in which you meet information changes what you conclude from it. The same set of facts, encountered in a different sequence, does not leave you in the same place. Someone who meets one strong angle first and the rest afterwards ends up somewhere different from someone who meets the range first and that same angle afterwards. That is why the maps open on the whole spread of coverage rather than on a ranked list. The first thing on screen is how wide the disagreement is, before anything has been sorted into best and worst.
You would not ask a pharmacist to be your physician, even though a pharmacist knows a great deal about medicine. The knowledge is real and the role is different. A single outlet is in the same position. It can be careful, well sourced and worth reading, and still be one account of an event rather than the account of it.
So the belief this site is built on is that the useful unit is the comparison. One report tells you what happened as one newsroom understood it. Several reports of the same event, set beside each other with the same measurements applied to each, tell you something that none of them says on its own: where they agree, where they diverge, and which parts of the story only some of them thought worth including. That last one is usually the most informative and is the hardest to notice while reading a single article.
The same standard applies to the project itself. The arithmetic behind every score is published on the methodology page, including the cases where a measurement is known to be unreliable. The underlying data is available for research and reuse on request (API and data). What the project costs to run and what any donation goes toward are itemised on the support page, month by month. There are no advertisers and no paywall, so there is nothing here being optimised for other than being useful to read.
You don't need another news source. You need a way to understand them.
The two lists are worded differently because they are two different kinds of promise. The left column is absolute because nothing on it requires effort to keep, only a decision not to do it. The right column asks for judgment, and a project that promised those without qualification would be overclaiming on the same page where it asks you not to take claims on trust.
This project publishes what it gets wrong, in a record anyone can read: what a reader would have seen, when it started, when it was noticed, and how long it took to fix.
Three dates rather than one, because "a correction was published" is the easy half. What says whether a project is careful is how long the wrong thing was live before anyone noticed, and how long it stayed wrong after they did. Both are columns in the record, so an entry cannot look tidy by leaving them out, and anything still unfixed says so in those words.
The record is currently empty, and that is not a claim that no mistakes have been made. This site measures publishers partly by how often they correct themselves, and it treats an empty correction record as an open question rather than a clean one, because a record can be empty when nobody is checking. The same reading applies here. Holding itself to a softer standard than the outlets it measures is the one thing this page cannot afford to do.
To make complex public information easier to investigate, understand, and independently evaluate.
The Aporia exists to help people understand information without requiring them to surrender their judgment to a source, an institution, an ideology, or an algorithm.