What to Do
Four questions on every item: provenance, source, date, location. Corroborate with something that could have come out differently. Grade the source and the information separately. Repetition is not corroboration.
How It Fails
Treating volume as weight. Fifty accounts carrying one screenshot is one source, not fifty. A single uncorroborated defector became a war’s evidentiary spine.
Check
- Earliest instance located, not just the loudest
- Source and information graded separately
- At least one independent corroborant, or the gap is stated
- Content that failed verification is kept and labeled, not deleted