Editorial Policy
How stories get chosen here, how they are sourced and corrected, and where the line between a human editor and a machine runs.
What this page is for
A small site earns trust the same way a large one does: by saying in advance how it works, and then working that way. This page sets out our standards so that you can hold us to them. If we fall short of anything written here, we would rather hear about it than not.
What we publish
Three kinds of material. First, live records: pages such as the Chat Control Tracker and the table of where the 27 governments stand, which are maintained rather than written once, with a last-checked date, a source for every claim and a changelog. Second, original analysis written for this site, above all the Who Decides? series. These pieces try to explain how censorship, surveillance and platform power actually operate, rather than repeating the day’s outrage. Third, practical guides. They are written to be used, and if a guide does not leave you able to do something by the end, it has failed.
How we choose what to cover
We look for evidence, real-world consequence, and the chance to make something complicated understandable. We prefer a documented case to a dramatic claim, and a boring pattern that affects millions to a spectacular anecdote that affects nobody. We avoid conspiracy-style framing, and we do not publish to feed anger for its own sake. When a story is important but the evidence is thin, we would rather wait than guess in print.
Sourcing and verification
Claims are checked against primary material wherever it exists: platform policies, court filings, official documents, published studies, transparency reports. We link to those sources so that you can read them yourself and disagree with us. Where a claim cannot be confirmed, we say so plainly in the text rather than smoothing it over. “We could not verify this” is a legitimate sentence.
We do not treat a single anonymous account as proof of anything. When we protect a source’s identity, we say why, and we describe what kind of evidence we saw. We correct numbers to their source, and we do not sharpen a quotation to make it land better.
Facts, analysis and opinion
These are different things and we label them as such. Reporting and analysis stay separate from personal viewpoint, and anything that is primarily a viewpoint is published as signed commentary, labelled Opinion at the top of the text and listed under Opinion on the series page. You should never have to guess whether you are reading a documented finding or an editor’s judgement.
Work we republished
Until September 2026 the site also republished selected reporting from publishers who release their work under open licences. That has ended, and those pieces stay online. Republished pieces keep their author’s byline, name their original publisher, and link back to the original. We do not change quotes, numbers or conclusions in someone else’s work. Our edits are limited to formatting, and to translation where we publish in another language; if we shorten a piece, we say so. Republished work stays under the licence its publisher chose, which is not necessarily ours. The details, including how others may republish our own material under CC BY 4.0, are on our republishing page.
What readers send us
Readers do not publish here directly. Cases and documents sent through the submit form are read by the editor, checked like any other source, and used only with the sender’s agreement on whether they are named. Analyses by outside experts appear occasionally, under the author’s real name, after editing, and are labelled as such.
Where AI fits, and where it does not
We use AI tools, currently Anthropic’s Claude, for research, drafting, translation and checking. Drafts can be substantially machine-written from the primary documents we cite. Every editorial decision is made by a human editor: what gets published, how it is framed, what gets corrected, what gets dropped. AI does not decide what appears on this site, and no unreviewed machine output is published: every sentence is read, edited and approved by the editor before publication, and the editor is the person answerable for it. This paragraph was made more specific on 11 September 2026.
Corrections, updates and right of reply
Factual errors are corrected as soon as the facts can be confirmed, not when it is convenient. Small fixes such as a typo or a broken link are made silently. Anything that changes the meaning gets a dated correction note at the foot of the article, saying what was wrong and what it now says. We do not quietly delete a mistake and pretend it never ran.
If a piece names a person or an organisation critically, they may respond, and a substantive response will be published or linked alongside the piece. Requests for corrections go to info@brusselsrecord.com and we aim to answer within a few working days.
People in stories
We take particular care with minors and with people who are vulnerable or at risk, and we remove identifying details where publication could cause them harm. We do not publish private personal data because it happens to be technically available, and we weigh a real public interest against the harm to a specific person. How many readers a detail might attract is not part of that calculation.
Independence and money
We do not accept payment for coverage. No article, guide or mention on this site is for sale, and nobody outside the editorial process gets to see a piece before it runs or to ask for changes. If any link on the site could ever earn us a commission, that is disclosed on our affiliate disclosure page. Where we write about a tool or organisation with which we have any relationship, we say so in the piece.
Contributors
We welcome independent writers, journalists, researchers and people with first-hand experience. Contributors keep ownership of their work; submissions may be reviewed and edited before publication for accuracy, clarity and sourcing, and we will not publish a piece under someone’s name in a form they have not seen. Details of how to send us something are on our submissions page and on the page for journalists and contributors.
Who is responsible
Editor: Pavel Kadlec. E-mail: info@brusselsrecord.com. This page is reviewed as the site changes, and the version you are reading is the one we consider ourselves bound by.
