Aporia · Terms of Service

In plain language

Aporia analyses news coverage. It is not a fact-checker, and nothing here tells you whether a claim is true.
It never reproduces article text. You get a machine-written summary and a link to the publisher's own page.
Its scores are opinions produced by a published method, not statements of fact about anyone's honesty or politics.
If you are named on this site and something is wrong, tell us and we will look at it. Clause 7 says how.
Donations are voluntary gifts. They buy nothing and are not tax receipts. Refundable for 7 days, then not.
This summary is for orientation only. The numbered clauses below are the agreement.

1. Acceptance

By using Aporia (the "Service"), you agree to these Terms of Service (the "Terms"). If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

Most of the Service is readable without an account. If you create an account, you are asked to accept these Terms explicitly, and the version you accepted and the time you accepted it are recorded against your account. You can see that record at any time on your history page.

If you are using the Service on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you are authorised to bind that organisation, and "you" means that organisation.

2. What this service is, and is not

Aporia collects publicly available news articles from RSS feeds and sitemaps, stores their text, derives structured signals from that text, groups articles that appear to describe the same event, and presents the result as maps, rankings and drill-down pages.

It is not a fact-checker. Nothing in the Service verifies whether any claim in any article is true. The "trust score" attached to a publisher measures observable proxies such as how often that publisher issues corrections and how often its sentences are hedged. It is not a measure of truthfulness, accuracy or credibility, and a publisher with no recorded corrections may simply be one nobody has checked.

It is not a news publisher or republisher. The Service does not reproduce article text on any page. It shows machine-written summaries of what an article reported and links out to the publisher's own page. Where an image is shown it is loaded from the publisher's own server and is not copied.

It is not advice. Nothing on the Service is legal, financial, medical, investment or professional advice, and nothing on it should be relied on as the sole basis for any decision.

Its analysis is automated and imperfect. Summaries, scores, categories, groupings and bylines are produced by software, including language models, without human review of each result. They contain errors. Clause 7 sets out how they should be read and what to do if one concerns you.

3. Eligibility and accounts

You must be at least 16 years old to create an account. If the law where you live sets a higher age for consenting to online services, that age applies instead.

An account exists so the Service can keep a record of the articles you open and the searches you run, and to let you raise support tickets. You are responsible for keeping your password confidential and for everything done through your account. Tell us promptly if you believe it has been used without your permission.

Choose a username that is not misleading. Usernames that impersonate a real person, a publisher or this Service may be reclaimed.

You may delete individual reading-history entries and clear your search history yourself from your history page, and you may ask us to delete the account entirely. See the Privacy Policy for what happens to the data.

4. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

scrape, crawl or bulk-download the Service, or use it to build a competing dataset, beyond what /robots.txt permits;
make automated requests at a rate that degrades the Service for others;
attempt to reach administrative areas, internal endpoints or another user's data, or to defeat any access control;
probe, scan or test the security of the Service without our prior written permission, other than in good faith to report a vulnerability to andrew.anuichi@gmail.com;
upload or submit, through support tickets or any other route, unlawful, defamatory, harassing or infringing material;
present the Service's output as a verified fact-check, as a rating of any person's honesty, or as the work of anyone other than this Service;
use the Service to harass, target or build a dossier on any individual journalist.

We may rate-limit, block or suspend access that breaches this clause.

5. Third-party content and copyright

Articles, headlines, bylines and images that originate with a publisher remain the property of that publisher or its licensors. The Service does not claim any ownership of them and does not grant you any rights in them.

What the Service shows of a third-party article is limited by design:

the headline and the publisher's name, as identifiers;
a summary written by the Service in its own words;
short extracted sentences, where they are the subject of the analysis being displayed;
a lead image loaded directly from the publisher's own server;
a link to the publisher's own page.

Full article text is stored internally so the analysis can be re-run without re-fetching the publisher's page, and is not served to visitors. We believe this use is permitted as fair dealing, fair use or the equivalent in the relevant jurisdiction, but we do not ask you to rely on that view, and clause 6 exists so a rightsholder who disagrees has a route that does not begin with a lawyer.

If you are a publisher and would rather not be included at all, tell us at andrew.anuichi@gmail.com and we will stop collecting from your feeds and remove what we hold. We will also honour robots.txt and standard machine-readable opt-out signals on your site.

6. Takedown requests

To ask for material to be removed, write to andrew.anuichi@gmail.com with:

the page or pages on the Service that concern you, by URL;
what specifically on them you say is infringing or unlawful;
your relationship to the material, and if you are acting for a rightsholder, your authority to do so;
contact details we can reply to.

We aim to acknowledge within 5 working days and to act on well-founded requests promptly. We may remove material while we look into a request. If we decline, we will say why. Nothing in this clause limits any statutory notice procedure available to you.

7. Automated analysis, scores and right of reply

This clause governs everything the Service says about a named publisher or a named journalist. Read it before relying on any figure on this site.

7.1 The scores are opinion, not fact

Leaning scores, trust scores, hedged-claim rates, framing labels, beat breakdowns and every other derived figure are opinions formed by an automated method, applied to a limited body of text, and published together with the method that produced them. They are not assertions of fact about any person's or organisation's honesty, competence, bias or political beliefs. The methodology page sets out how each figure is calculated, and every figure on the site links to it.

7.2 What they are computed from, and its limits

Figures are computed only from articles the Service happened to collect, which is never the whole of anyone's work. A byline attributed by automated extraction may be wrong, may be a desk or a wire service rather than a person, and may merge or split people with similar names. A leaning score rates the writing in one article, not the person who wrote it, and the Service deliberately declines to place an individual journalist on a left-right scale unless it holds enough of their work for the average to mean anything.

7.3 Do not use these figures to make decisions about people

You must not use the Service's output as an input to employment, hiring, commissioning, credit, insurance or any other decision about an individual. It is not fit for that purpose and is not offered for it.

7.4 Right of reply and correction

If you are a journalist or a publisher named on this Service, you may:

ask for factual errors about you to be corrected, including a byline wrongly attributed to you;
ask for a short statement of your own to be shown on your page;
object to the analysis of your work being published at all, and ask for your page to be removed;
ask what data the Service holds about you, and ask for it to be deleted.

Write to andrew.anuichi@gmail.com. We aim to acknowledge within 5 working days. Requests to correct a factual error or to remove a page are acted on without requiring you to explain why. This is offered in addition to, and does not replace, your rights under data-protection law, which the Privacy Policy sets out.

8. Our content and your licence to use it

The software, page designs, written explanations, and the summaries, scores and groupings the Service produces are ours or our licensors'.

You may read the Service, and quote or link to its output for personal, journalistic, educational or research purposes, provided you credit Aporia, link to the page you took it from, and do not present a figure without the qualification clause 7 puts on it. Any other reproduction, redistribution or commercial use needs our written permission.

Feedback you send us may be used without obligation or payment. Content you submit through support tickets stays yours, and you grant us permission to store and use it to answer you.

9. Donations

Donations are voluntary gifts to support the running of the Service. They are not a purchase, a subscription, a membership or a fee, and they buy no goods, services, features, influence over the analysis, or removal from it.

Payments are processed by Stripe. We do not receive or store your full card details. Stripe's own terms and privacy policy apply to its handling of your payment.
Amounts are shown and charged in the currency stated at checkout.
You may ask for a refund within 7 days of making a donation, for any reason and without giving one. Write to andrew.anuichi@gmail.com within that week and we will refund it in full. After 7 days a donation is non-refundable, except where the law requires otherwise or the payment was not authorised by you.
Every donation taken through this site is a single, one-off payment. There is no subscription and no repeating charge, and nothing here stores a way to charge you again. If you have set up a repeating payment yourself at your bank or payment provider, it is yours to stop there, because we did not create it and cannot cancel it for you. The refund above applies to each payment as it arrives.
Unless we say otherwise in writing, Andrew Anuichi is not a registered charity and a donation is not tax-deductible and is not accompanied by a tax receipt.
Totals and goals shown on the support page are published in aggregate. Your name is not published unless you ask us to publish it.

10. Availability and changes

The Service is provided on a best-effort basis by a small operation. There is no uptime commitment. We may change, suspend or discontinue any part of it, including any page, figure or dataset, at any time and without notice.

Data on the Service is refreshed by a pipeline that runs periodically. Figures may be out of date, and the absence of coverage of an event does not mean it did not happen.

11. Disclaimers

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied or statutory, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure or error-free, that its analysis is accurate or complete, that bylines are correctly attributed, that articles are correctly grouped, or that summaries faithfully represent the articles they describe.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties. Where that is so, this clause applies to the maximum extent that jurisdiction permits, and nothing in these Terms excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

12. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, and subject to the final paragraph of clause 11:

we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for loss of profit, revenue, data, goodwill or reputation, however caused;
we are not liable for any decision you or anyone else takes on the basis of the Service's output;
our total aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with the Service and these Terms is limited to the greater of the total amount you donated to us in the 12 months before the claim arose, or 100 Canadian dollars.

You accept that this limit is reasonable given that the Service is offered free of charge.

13. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify us against claims, losses and reasonable legal costs arising from your breach of these Terms, your misuse of the Service, or your republication of its output in a way clause 8 does not permit. This does not apply where the claim arises from our own act or omission.

14. Suspension and termination

You may stop using the Service at any time and may ask us to delete your account.

We may suspend or terminate an account that breaches these Terms, or where we are required to by law. Where it is practical and lawful to do so, we will tell you why and give you a chance to respond. Clauses 5, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 17 and 18 survive termination.

15. Privacy

The Privacy Policy explains what personal data the Service holds about you, what it holds about journalists and publishers it analyses, why, and what you can ask us to do about it. It forms part of these Terms.

Two facts worth stating here as well: the language models the Service uses run locally on our own machine, so article text and your activity are not sent to a third-party AI provider; and the Service deliberately does not record your IP address, your browser's user-agent, your referrer, or which specific pages a signed-out visitor viewed.

16. Changes to these terms

We may amend these Terms. The version number and effective date at the top of this page always say which version is in force.

For changes that materially affect your rights or obligations, we will give reasonable notice before they take effect, and if you hold an account we will ask you to accept the new version the next time you sign in. Continuing to use the Service after a change takes effect means you accept it. If you do not accept it, stop using the Service and ask us to delete your account.

17. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the law of Ontario, Canada, and the courts of the courts of Ontario, Canada have exclusive jurisdiction, except that:

if you are a consumer resident elsewhere, you keep the benefit of any mandatory consumer-protection rules of the country you live in, and may bring proceedings in its courts where its law gives you that right;
either of us may seek injunctive relief in any court of competent jurisdiction.

Before starting proceedings, please write to andrew.anuichi@gmail.com and give us 30 days to resolve the matter. Most things are fixable that way.

18. General

These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between us about the Service. If any clause is held unenforceable, the rest continues in force and the clause is read down to the minimum extent necessary. A delay in enforcing a right is not a waiver of it. You may not assign your rights under these Terms; we may assign ours to a successor to the Service on notice to you. Nothing here creates a partnership, agency or employment relationship, and nobody other than you and us has any right to enforce these Terms.

Terms of Service