Is a high Bullshit Index a fake-news flag?

No. A high score means a story is being told with more drama than the underlying facts warrant. The underlying event can be real. The Bullshit Index measures presentation noise, not truth value.

How often does the index update?

Every two hours, on the same cycle as the headline ingest. The homepage dial averages the day's surfaced stories; individual story scores are stamped at ingest and never change.

Can I see the Bullshit Index for a specific story?

Not on the public site yet — we surface it as an aggregate today. The score is stored per article in our database and used for ranking. We are evaluating a per-headline disclosure for a future release.

Why do I sometimes see a high index on a slow news day?

Because there is less factual reporting to dilute the speculation and commentary. When the wires are quiet, the loud voices have a bigger share of the page.

What is the Bullshit Index?

The Bullshit Index is a single number from 0 to 100 that tells you how much theatrical packaging is wrapped around a story. A 0 means the headline is plain, the sourcing is multi-outlet, the verbs are factual, and the underlying event is real. A 100 means the headline is a question mark stacked on top of an adjective, the sourcing is one anonymous person on social media, and the substantive news could fit in a tweet with room left over for an emoji.

It is computed per headline at ingest time and rolled up across the day for the homepage dial. The four components are weighted: clickbait-pattern markers in the headline (interrogatives, ALL-CAPS, ellipses, hyperbolic verbs) contribute about 30 percent of the score; speculation density (modal verbs, conditional clauses, the word "could") contributes another 25 percent; single-source claims with no corroboration add 25 percent; and emotional-intensity vocabulary contributes the final 20 percent.

We publish the index because most news ranking systems reward outrage and recency. The Bullshit Index reverses that — items with high scores rank lower in our briefs and on category pages, and items from high-trust wire services that pass the index cleanly rank higher. It is not a partisan filter. A press release from a Senator and a press release from a hedge fund both index high; a Reuters dispatch about a quarterly earnings print indexes low.

The dial on the homepage shows the day's median across all stories surfaced. When it climbs above 60, it usually means a single noisy news cycle has captured the wires and is being amplified through commentary. When it sits below 30, the wires are quiet and the substantive reporting is dominating. It is a thermometer for the noise level, not a judgement on any specific story.

FAQ