About: River City Ledger

River City Ledger checks the specific, checkable parts of a claim against real sources. Not a gut reaction, and not one person's word against another's.

What this is

Paste in a claim (a post, a headline, something someone told you) and this tool breaks it into the individual factual assertions inside it, checks each one against live sources, and shows its reasoning openly instead of just handing back a single "true" or "false." Most real claims bundle several things together: a solid fact, an exaggeration, and a piece of unverifiable framing, all in one sentence. Treating that as one verdict hides more than it reveals, so this tool doesn't.

How it works

1. Decomposition

The claim is split into individual sub-claims. Pure opinion or rhetorical framing gets set aside, and only checkable factual assertions get evaluated.

2. Live sourcing

Each sub-claim is checked against current web sources at the moment you run it, not from memory and not from a fixed database that can go stale.

3. Tiered evidence

Sources are weighed by tier. Primary and official sources count for more than reputable reporting, which counts for more than aggregators or social posts that just repeat something without adding evidence.

4. Origin tracing

When a claim appears to trace back to a single source that got reworded and passed along without any new evidence, that chain gets flagged. It's a common pattern behind claims that feel more confirmed than they actually are.

Reading the verdicts

Verified Disputed False Unverifiable

Verified means multiple independent, credible sources agree. Disputed means credible sources conflict, or a claim overstates what its own cited source actually supports. False means sources directly contradict the claim. Unverifiable means no source exists either way. That's a statement about the available evidence, not proof that something is false.

What this isn't

This isn't a court verdict, and it isn't infallible. Confidence bands reflect sourcing found at the moment a claim was checked, so for fast-moving news, that can change within hours. Sub-claims are identified and sourced automatically, and you're always welcome to click through and read the underlying sources yourself instead of taking the label at face value. Treat this as a starting point for your own judgment, not a replacement for it.

Sharing a report

Every report gets a permanent link, so you can share a claim check anywhere text can go: a text thread, a forum post, a comment where images aren't allowed. You can also save a report as an image directly from the results page. Shared reports reflect the evidence available when they were generated and aren't re-checked automatically after the fact.