Public Charter
Our commitments to you, codified and non-negotiable.
No advertising. Ever.
Advertising creates perverse incentives around engagement optimization that are fundamentally incompatible with our mission. Substrate will never display ads, accept sponsored content, or allow advertisers to influence story ranking or placement.
No data sales.
We do not sell, rent, or share user data with third parties for commercial purposes. Your reading habits are yours. We collect only what is necessary to deliver the service.
Full algorithmic transparency.
The formula, weights, and any updates to our relevance algorithm are published and versioned. Every change includes a rationale. The algorithm is deterministic — not a black-box ML model.
Source primacy and auditability.
Every story includes a transparency panel showing the sources consulted, bias signals detected, and confidence scores. For any published story, the full processing audit trail is available.
No editorial voice.
Substrate has no opinion section, no editorial board, and no endorsed perspective. Our only agenda is accuracy. Stories are presented in neutral, declarative prose with no adjectives or adverbs that imply judgment.
Bias detection is published, not hidden.
The bias signals we score — language, framing, selection, and source imbalance — are named on the algorithm page, surfaced on every article card, and tied to each story's framing-risk score. Corrections and methodology questions can be sent to contact@substrate.news; substantive critiques will be addressed in the changelog.