Editorial standards & legal.

01Editorial standards.

Every story published to thegen.media adheres to six commitments. These are operational, not aspirational — each is monitored by a test in the public test suite (test name shown alongside).

1. 01Two-source minimum for non-public-record claims

   test_two_source_minimum

   Every factual claim must be either (a) on-the-record from an identifiable source or public record, or (b) corroborated by a second independent source. Anonymous-source-only claims do not ship.

2. 02Bias score on every article

   test_bias_score_present

   Computed from the cited source spectrum (lean × role weight), not from text sentiment. Articles without a bias score are flagged 'unscored' — never lie in UI.

3. 03Sponsor isolation

   test_sponsor_neutral_ranking

   Active sponsorship_placements rows do not influence ranking. The homepage feed query output is byte-identical with and without an active sponsor row. Sponsor cards are visually distinct from editorial.

4. 04Source attestation

   test_source_present

   Every cited link is checked for live availability at publish time. Source-snapshot retention is on the v2.1 roadmap; today the URL + outlet are stamped into the public claims ledger at publish.

5. 05Public revision log

   test_revision_diff_public

   Every substantive edit creates a row in v2.revisions; public diffs render under each article footer and on /retractions. We do not silently rewrite history.

6. 06Lens honesty

   test_lens_volume_disclosed

   When a lens drops below its minimum daily threshold, the homepage shows the Lighter Coverage Banner naming the threshold and the fallback chain. We never imply we cover what we don't.

02Disclosure of AI use.

Six named agents handle the editorial pipeline. Their prompts are MIT-licensed at v2.1 in the thegen-agents repo and visible on disk at prompts/*.md in the open repo today.

What the agents do

• sourcer scans candidate URLs from RSS + the editorial feed and selects stories worth a write-up.
• verifier extracts atomic claims and cross-references them against the source corpus.
• editor writes title / dek / body_md from the verified claims.
• bias_scorer scores cited outlets on lean (-1..+1) and reliability (0..1) using a 12-axis rubric — see /methodology/source/[id].
• localizer detects geography of named entities, normalizes currency/units, writes per-lens framing rows.
• reviewer runs a 7-point editorial checklist and gates publish.

What humans always do

Every story passes through a named human reviewer (Editor-in-Chief or delegated reviewer) before publish. Editorial sign-off is a hard gate — see v2.compute_article_bias_score and the publish-invariant checker in lib/articles/invariants.ts: article cannot ship without an active human_reviewer_id.

Visible labels

Articles carry a stable persona byline (we currently publish as Wren) — never as a fictional human persona. The persona field is editorial voice, not authorship; the human reviewer is named on every article. The agent chain (e.g. [sourcer → verifier → editor]) is rendered on every article’s byline strip.

03Indian regulatory baseline.

thegen.media is operated by thegen.media Pvt Ltd, a company registered in India with India-resident directors. The legal posture below is the operational reality, not a roadmap.

• IT (Intermediary Guidelines) Rules 2021, as amended. Grievance Officer: Himanshu, mediathegen@gmail.com. 24-hour acknowledgment, 15-day resolution SLA. File at /about/grievance.
• Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023. Privacy notice and consent flows are DPDP-aligned. DPO is the CTO until reader volume warrants a dedicated officer. We use no tracking cookies before consent and run no third-party fingerprinting.
• Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023, §356 (replaces IPC §499/§500): truth + public good is the defense. Every article’s claims table row is the machine-readable truth-defense workflow.
• IT Act 2000, §85. Both directors have signed on with full understanding of personal liability. There is no media liability insurance for v2.0 — editorial scope discipline (see below) is the protection.
• Press Council of India norms. Voluntarily adhered. We are web-only and not bound by the Council, but the norms strengthen our public posture.

Editorial scope (what insurance would cover, that we cover by discipline instead)

• Public officials in public capacity, public companies, public records — yes.
• Identifiable private individuals — no, unless quoted from public record.
• Allegations of crime against named individuals — no, unless charges are filed and we cite the filing.
• Anonymous-source-only assertions — no. Two-source minimum.
• Original investigative reporting — not in v2.0. Arrives at v2.5 alongside an insurance review and counsel retainer.

04Corrections & retractions.

If we got something wrong, you’ll know. Three categories:

Correction

Factual error in a published article. We update the article, add a top-of-page revision banner with the date and what changed; the prior version is preserved in v2.revisions. Listed at /retractions.

Retraction

Article should not have published as written. Status flips to retracted; the body remains visible behind a retraction notice naming what was wrong and why. We email anyone who shared it from the article page. Retraction notices stay live in perpetuity.

Pending revision

We’ve received a credible challenge but are still verifying. An “under review” banner state ships in v2.1 — until then, pending challenges are tracked in the grievance pipeline at /about/grievance and acknowledged within 24 hours per the IT Rules SLA.

Filing a correction. Email corrections@thegen.media with the article URL, the disputed claim, and your evidence. Triaged within 24 business hours. We acknowledge every receipt — including the wrong ones.

05Takedown & right to reply.

We do not action takedown demands silently. Three categories, each with a public process.

Right to reply

If you are named, quoted, or accused in an article, we will append a labeled Reply from [name] block at the bottom of the article — verbatim, up to 500 words, your words, our presentation. No edits. We will note what we have done in the revision log.

Defamation / inaccuracy

Send a notice to legal@thegen.media. We will respond within 5 business days. If your claim is correct, we will issue a correction or retraction. If we disagree, we will tell you why and link the supporting evidence. We do not silently remove articles. If we remove, the URL returns 410 Gone with a public notice naming the legal jurisdiction that compelled removal.

Personal data — DPDP, GDPR, CCPA

For removal of personal data (a name, address, image of a private individual), use privacy@thegen.media. We comply with the Indian DPDP Act 2023, GDPR (EU/UK), California CCPA, and equivalent laws across our other lenses. Compliance does not require silent removal — see the takedown ledger at /retractions (the public takedown ledger ships as a separate route in v2.1; in the interim, retractions and removals are listed there).

06Jurisdictions & restrictions.

thegen.media is a digital publication, not a court. We respect court orders that bind us; we publicly note when we comply. Editorial registrations as of in-force date:

Per-lens legal review

Articles default to lenses [GLOBAL, IN] on publish. Distribution to UK / US / CA / BD lenses requires explicit reviewer sign-off written into article_lenses.legal_clearance. The reviewer for v2.0 is one of the two joint Editors-in-Chief.

Geo-restricted content

If a piece is restricted in a jurisdiction by law (court order, statutory restriction), the URL renders a public notice naming the jurisdiction, the date, and (where legally possible) the order. The article remains available outside that jurisdiction. We never quietly fail to serve.

07Reader data.

We are not in the surveillance business. We do not run third-party ad pixels, do not sell email addresses, and do not share reader behaviour with any platform. We collect what is operationally necessary — see the cookie summary below — and we publish a quarterly transparency report listing every government data request we received and how we responded (first report ships with v2.1).

Cookie summary: 1 essential (signed-session marker, set on auth success). 1 first-party analytics (opt-out one-click). Zero advertising or cross-site tracking pixels.

08Legal contacts.

Editorial corrections: corrections@thegen.media
Defamation / takedown: legal@thegen.media
Privacy / personal data: privacy@thegen.media
Grievance Officer (IT Rules 2021): Himanshu · mediathegen@gmail.com · /about/grievance

Postal address available on request. Service of legal process via legal@thegen.media in the first instance; physical address provided on request to verified counsel.