Logically aims to publish an informative and useful judgement on any claim submitted to us by a user. Rarely, we will not be able to responsibly issue a judgement on a claim, and may reject it.

What can we check?

Logically will investigate, verify and adjudicate any suitable claim submitted to us by a user.

A suitable claim:

• Is any statement made in a public or publicly accessible forum.
• Can be properly assessed as more or less reasonable, or simply true or false.
• Can be adjudicated on the basis of publicly available evidence and commonly held standards of reasoning.

Logically may reject a claim for the following reasons:

• We can only check assertions, or sentences which can be interpreted as assertions. An assertion is any sentence which aims to make somebody believe something to be true. If a submitted claim cannot be interpreted as an assertion, it will be rejected.
• Sometimes an otherwise valid claim cannot be settled by any evidence to which we have access, nor could have access to in the future. These will usually be claims which are entirely grounded in matters of taste, historical claims which no evidence can bear upon, or claims of a fundamentally moral or religious nature.
• Very occasionally, it may be necessary for us to reject a claim because engaging with it at all would be irresponsible. This may be because we do not have the space, the expertise or the capacity to give sufficient context to a claim, which would make any judgement we could make ultimately unhelpful. We will also not engage with trolls, nor entertain harmful conspiracies, unless there is a clear journalistic case for publishing a rebuttal.

Only supervisors are authorised to reject claims, and all rejected claims are reported to senior fact checkers to confirm that the rejection was appropriate. If you think your claim has been unfairly rejected, you can ask for us to look at it again through the app.

Claim Publication Policy

• Any claim submitted by a user which is not rejected for the above reasons receives a judgement based on the best available evidence.
• Our claims are awarded a star rating out of five by our supervising fact checkers. Stars are awarded according to a fact check’s interest, rigour, style, importance, and potential impact.
• Any claim which is awarded four or five stars is published in the fact check library on our website. Claims must be awarded at least three stars before they are returned to users.
• We highlight a selection of published fact checks in our highlight feed on our app and on our website. These are four or five star claims, rotated daily, and selected for local interest (different highlight feeds are shown in different geographical areas).

Once we receive your request, it’s assigned to one of our fact checking team, who then begins to conduct research into the claim. They try to track the claim back to its origins, analyse its context and then find as many primary sources as possible to either support or refute it.

Once they have found enough evidence, they made a decision about how reliable they believe the claim is, and write up a report about their findings, as well as the path they followed to find their evidence. This becomes the fact check itself, and once it passes through several levels of oversight and is checked and double-checked, we send our findings on to you.

How do we decide the point at issue?

The point at issue is the belief, or set of beliefs, which is either asserted or challenged by a claim. To try and make our fact-checks as useful as possible, we will sometimes edit the submitted claim to remove any ambiguity about what the point at issue is, and focusing on the parts of the claim we think are most interesting (if we focus on the wrong thing, you can ask us to check it again).

How do you decide what is helpful?

It is more helpful to believe something true about a subject than to believe something false. A true belief is more likely to lead you to more true beliefs than a false belief is. True beliefs are useful.

It is also more helpful to depend on reliable sources of information than to depend on unreliable sources, because reliable sources will tend to give you more accurate and complete information.

It is unhelpful to accept claims which are weakly justified by the available evidence, or which are potentially misleading or manipulative, because those things will tend to promote false beliefs rather than true ones.

How we handle deception?

When we say that a claim is partly true, false or misleading, that does not imply deceptive intent unless we explicitly say otherwise. We will only levy a charge of deception when not to do so would be misleading given the available contextual evidence. When we levy a charge of deception, we specify the kind of deception we are accusing the speaker of:

• Lying: saying something you know to be false in order to deceptively cause others to believe it is true.
• Bull: making assertions without caring whether what you’re saying is true or false
• Paltering: intentionally deceiving by making true statements (usually by omitting necessary context)
• Other, specific variety of deception not listed here (deception by omission, for example).

Our principal mission is to improve the quality of civic discourse and to give citizens the tools they need to critically analyse, engage with and participate in democratic political processes. We believe that it is both possible and desirable to be politically engaged without being prejudicial, to debate and disagree with honesty and integrity, and to demand the highest standards of courtesy, rationality and respect from political allies and opposition alike.

We believe that the best way to achieve this is by developing non-partisan, unbiased resources to establish what facts are beyond dispute, what positions can be reasonably held on the basis of those facts, and to give everybody the resources necessary to argue for what they believe without undermining our shared commitment to arguing on the basis of facts.

As employees of Logically, we understand that in order to play our part in establishing what is true and what is not, Logically must be trusted across the political spectrum. Furthermore, we understand that while being politically engaged is a civic duty, our role as an independent fact-checking organisation requires that our work be motivated by broad political and ethical considerations which transcend our partisan political interests.

As such, we undertake to ensure that all our work at Logically is free from bias and partisan interest, and that our personal political views will never influence our work; nor should our work ever permit reasonable suspicion of being unduly influenced by our own partisan or political views. Furthermore, we undertake to comport ourselves in our private lives and our online and other communications in ways which can never undermine the position of Logically as an unbiased, non-partisan organisation.

How do we decide what sources to use?

Different kinds of evidence justify different kinds of claims; empirical claims may be justified by scientific research, economic predictions may be justified by appealing to expert bodies, political claims may be justified by polling data, or by appealing to generally agreed upon political principles. However, there are standards which many different kinds of evidence can meet, which make them comparable in terms of quality.

This is our hierarchy of sources. We always prefer sources higher up the list than lower down. Wherever applicable, we also prefer primary sources (first-hand information) to secondary sources (information about primary sources). We will always state if there is reason to believe a cited source is unreliable, or if there is a plausible conflict of interest in their reporting.

Our rule of thumb for determining the quality of a source is to ask “how much would they have to lose by misleading us?” A source which has more to lose by making a bad mistake (like a respected researcher) will tend to be more reliable than one with less (such as an anonymous social media post). We require at least two sources of the highest available quality to confirm to confirm a judgement on a claim.

• Expert Consensus: Internationally respected organisations and experts in the relevant field explicitly accept this as indisputable fact.
• Peer Reviewed Research: Articles in high quality, peer-reviewed journals support this claim.
• Non-partisan government sources: Information, including on statistics, policy and law, from reliable, reputable and non-partisan government agencies (this would include the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau and the World Bank, but would not include any statement from any partisan political figure or their spokespeople.
• Expert opinion: Non-peer reviewed research or other forms of authoritative opinion given by people with strong existing ties to respectable international bodies relevant to the claim.
• Non-expert journalistic investigation: Investigation by people with no particular subject expertise, but who have strong institutional ties to respectable journalistic outlets, investigative bodies or research institutions.
• Eyewitness accounts: First-hand accounts of events by people who directly witnessed them (such accounts must always be corroborated).

Fact checks may need to be revised for a number of reasons, including the emergence of new information, discovery of new evidence, or to correct typographical errors. If you believe we have made an error in any aspect of one of our fact checks, submit a complaint through the app, or contact us through our contact page.

• Each fact check comes with a unique tracking code which allows our editorial team to quickly trace any fact check which may be the subject of an update, complaint or correction.
• Fact checks which are edited with substantive corrections will be marked with a ‘correction’ label on the sharable image.
• Fact checks which are edited with non-substantive corrections (to fix spelling, grammatical or other mistakes which do not contribute to the substance of the claim or judgement) will be marked as ‘updated’.
• Complaints will be assessed by senior members of the fact checking and editorial team, and promptly responded to, with reasons given for our decision to either correct a fact check or leave it as it stands.
• If you are not satisfied with our response, you will be able to issue a further complaint to our senior editor, who will take any necessary steps to satisfactorily address the issue, up to and including appointing an independent advisor to investigate the claim.
• Users who have received or tracked a fact check which is the subject of an update or a correction will be notified.

Journalistic Corrections and Right of Reply

If you notice something published in our journalistic, research or educational output which you believe to be inaccurate, misleading or unfair, please submit a correction request to our editorial team on our contact us page. Any complaints will be raised to the senior editor and responded to within 48 hours. Any complaint found to have substantive merit will be publicly corrected, and the correction given equal prominence to the article in question. We offer anybody who was the subject of criticism in our reporting the right to reply, provided a prima facie case can be made that our criticisms can be fairly addressed. Reasons for any refusal to grant a right to reply will be published on our website.

If you believe Logically is violating the IFCN code of principles, you can inform the IFCN directly here.