Why it exists
One rewards what's gripping. The other won't show its work.
Social platforms reward whatever is most gripping, so the fringe outruns the documented. Institutional fact-checking hands down verdicts without showing enough of the work, so a large part of the audience simply doesn't trust it.
Both fail someone who wants to know what is established, what is contested, and what is empty — and who wants to check the reasoning themselves.
Truth Onion shows where every claim sits, why it sits there, and exactly what evidence would move it.
The five layers
Better-proven sits closer to the center
- CoreDocumented, and survived challenge
- InnerWell supported; credible dispute remains
- MiddlePartial support
- OuterSpeculative; the path inward is stated
- OutermostChecked and failed; kept visible
Start here
Three things worth knowing
How it works
The rules that govern movement between layers, and a worked example of a claim sitting where its evidence put it.
Read the rules →What's built
The engine as it stands today, the automated test suites behind it, and what is designed but not yet built.
See the build state →Open source
Why the code has to be public before the project's integrity claim counts for anything.
Read the argument →No exemptions
The rules apply to the author
Self-assertion scores zero: a source asserting that its own author is right restates the claim rather than evidencing it. That rule has no carve-out for this project.
A claim about the engine's own integrity, backed by the engine's own passing test suite, sits at Outer. The tests restate the claim rather than independently verifying it, and the placement reason says so — the path inward is an audit by someone who isn't its author.