Methodology

How every fact on file is sourced, verified, and corrected

No fact without a source

Every claim in a brand's dossier carries a source URL — public reporting, a regulator filing, a court record, or the company's own statement. A claim that cannot be tied to a fetchable source is not eligible to be published, full stop. There is no field for "we heard" or "widely believed" — either a source exists and is shown, or the claim does not go on file.

Verified before publish

Facts are compiled by an automated research pipeline, then checked before anything goes live: the source URL for each claim is fetched and the page's actual content is checked against the specific claim being made. A citation that doesn't support what it's cited for is rejected, not published with a caveat. This step exists specifically so a source link on Ethos means "this page says what we say it says," not just "this URL loaded."

Records are still compiled automatically and can contain errors — mis-dated events, a source that goes offline later, a nuance automated research missed. Verification reduces publish-time errors; it does not make Ethos infallible. That's what the sources are for: check them.

Corroboration signal

Some facts carry one source. Others are corroborated by multiple independent sources reporting the same event — these are marked accordingly in the app (for example, "2 sources · corroborated"). More independent sources reporting the same claim is a stronger signal than one; single-sourced facts are shown exactly as such, not dressed up. Confidence is a property of the evidence, not a percentage we invent to sound precise.

The neutrality mechanism

Ethos separates two things that most "ethical shopping" tools collapse into one: the record (what a company did, when, sourced) and your score (whether that matters to you, and in which direction). The record is identical for every user. Scoring happens entirely on your device, from weights you set privately — nothing about your values is transmitted anywhere.

Under the hood, values are typed rather than force-fit into one shape:

• Spectra are genuinely bidirectional — a shopper can prefer less of something or more of it (for example, how loudly a brand campaigns on a cause). Both directions are first-class; Ethos does not pick a "default good" pole.
• Commitments are one-directional by design, because not everything has a coherent opposite — there is no "prefer more forced labor" setting to build a UI around. Commitments work as screens: a clean record costs nothing, and only a corroborated adverse finding moves the score. A brand can't buy points on a commitment axis, only lose them for documented conduct.

The result: the same dossier, with the same facts, produces a coherent profile whether you're weighting from one side of an issue or the other. Neutrality isn't a tone applied on top of the facts — it's the reason score and record are computed separately in the first place.

Corrections and the kill-switch

A visible corrections contact runs to every dossier and every page of this site: [email protected]. If you can point to a factual error — wrong date, source that doesn't say what we say it says, outdated ownership — tell us. Corrections are the highest-priority queue, ahead of new research.

Any single fact, or an entire dossier, can be unpublished within minutes of a substantiated dispute while it's re-verified — a status flag, not a deploy. A withdrawn record shows as withdrawn; it is not quietly left live while under dispute.

Limits, stated plainly

Ethos records are compiled automatically and reviewed by an automated verification pass, not by a newsroom. That is a real limitation, not a footnote — it's why every fact keeps its source attached rather than asking you to take our word for it. Ethos takes no position on any company and holds no political stance; it publishes what is on the public record and lets you decide what it means. See Support for how to report an issue, and Terms for how records and scores should (and shouldn't) be used.

This page describes how the product works as designed and shipped. If anything here stops matching the live app or the file for a specific brand, that's itself something to report: [email protected].