Questions to ask before you buy a news or narrative intelligence tool

Ask for the list of sources, by country, and how they were chosen. A tool that cannot tell you what it reads cannot tell you what it missed. Check that the countries and languages you care about are covered in depth, not only through a few aggregators.

Ask whether reprinted wire reports are counted once or many times, and how it decides that two articles are about the same event. These choices change every number on the screen.

Click any score, alert or chart and see whether it leads to the articles behind it. If your team will ever cite the tool to leadership, a regulator, a court or the press, every figure has to survive that question.

Be wary of tools that label claims true or false, or people as bad actors, on their own. Ask where a person reviews the evidence and whether the tool records who decided.

Ask for the limits in writing: whether it reads private messages, profiles private individuals, or generates posts and messaging. Limits stated up front are a good sign.

Ask where it runs, who can see your searches, whether queries are logged against the person who ran them, and whether a private deployment is possible for sensitive work.

Alethman publishes its own answers to these questions as six commitments: sources shown, a person decides, no sides, no messaging, public and entitled data only, every search logged.

Alethman’s answers