How Tell works

The Pravda network (also called “Portal Kombat”) is a documented network of pro-Russian websites that mass-republishes content in dozens of languages. Tell reads its Lithuanian edition through the public RSS feed and news sitemap, and looks for the same event in trusted Lithuanian news.

Every source, its health and its volume: Sources. Sources are grouped in country packs: a country is one Pravda-network edition plus the trusted outlets in that country. Adding a country means adding a list of sources, not writing code.

• Same event in trusted news: the story is real news. The interesting part is what the Pravda version adds, leaves out or reframes (coming next).
• Not found in trusted news (yet): the story only exists inside the network so far. That is a reason for a person to look, not a verdict.

A story appearing on the Pravda network does not make it false: the network also republishes real news. Tell never labels anything “fake” on its own. It shows the evidence and a person decides.

Current status

Matching uses a simple baseline (character n-gram similarity of title + summary, window ±72 h). Thresholds: ≥ 0.3 same event, 0.15–0.3 possible. Measured precision and false-positive rates will be published here once hand-labelled pairs are in.

Data: RSS feeds and news sitemaps only. We respect robots.txt. Feeds are polled every 15 minutes.