Sources and content policy

Principles

1. Link, attribute, transform. Never republish. Fresh News shows its own source-grounded explanations with attribution and a link to the original reporting.
2. Respect the technical signals. robots.txt, HTTP 403 and 429, paywalls and rate limits are treated as “no”. Fresh News never bypasses paywalls, rotates user agents, or retries around blocks.
3. Store the minimum. Headlines, links, dates and feed summaries cut to 500 characters.
4. Article text is untrusted input. It is never executed, never rendered as HTML, and never allowed to steer the model.

Independence

Each source declares an independence group, its syndication or ownership family, so copies of one wire story do not count as independent corroboration.

Prompt injection

Source text that looks like instructions is withheld from the model (the headline is kept, the summary dropped, and a flag recorded on the story). The prompt tells the model to treat sources as data, and the output is validated mechanically against the sources regardless.

Good news, honestly

“Positive developments” must be real reported events from credible outlets, not optimistic rewrites of neutral news. A good-news story resting on one outlet must say so, and is labelled Single source.

Source review status

All 63 built-in sources are currently unreviewed, which the content policy permits for personal use only. Before a public release each source must be reviewed against its publisher’s terms or removed. In Settings > Sources any feed can be retried or switched off.