Understanding veracity and severity
Two small labels do a lot of heavy lifting on Newsmap: veracity and severity. They sit beside every event as a coloured dot and a short word, and they are easy to misread as more authoritative than they are. Here is exactly what each one means and how to weigh it.
Veracity: how confident is the reporting?
Veracity is our shorthand for how well-supported a report appears to be — not a guarantee of truth. You will mostly see three states:
- Confirmed — the event has corroboration, typically because it has been cross-referenced across more than one source. Shown with a green indicator.
- Reported — a claim that has been published but not independently corroborated. Plausible, but stand-alone. Shown with an amber indicator.
- Unconfirmed — a single-source or low-confidence claim. Treat it as a lead, not a fact. Also shown in amber.
The key thing to internalise is that “confirmed” means cross-referenced, not verified on the ground by us. In a fast-moving situation, even multiple sources can be wrong together, especially when they all trace back to the same origin. Veracity raises or lowers your prior; it does not settle the question.
Severity: how big is the impact?
Severity is a 0-to-5 score that estimates the impact of an event, which the map renders as a label and uses to weight how prominent a marker is:
- 0–1 — Low. Minor or routine incidents.
- 2 — Moderate. Notable but contained.
- 3 — High. Significant impact or escalation.
- 4 — Critical. Major, with serious consequences.
- 5 — Extreme. The most severe class of event.
Severity is an estimate derived from the report text, so it inherits the report’s own framing. A dramatic write-up can inflate it; a terse one can understate it. We clamp the score to the 0–5 range and round it for display, and where a report gives us nothing to go on, severity is simply marked as unavailable rather than guessed at.
Reading the two together
The combination is more informative than either label alone. A high-severity, unconfirmed event is precisely the kind of thing to approach with caution — large claims travel fastest and are corrected slowest. A low-severity, confirmed event is reliable but may not be worth much of your attention. When you are scanning quickly, let veracity govern how much you trust an item and severity govern how much it matters.
Why we surface uncertainty instead of hiding it
It would be easy to show only “confirmed” events and present a tidier map. We think that would be misleading. Early, uncorroborated reports are often the first sign of something important, and hiding them would trade honesty for polish. By labelling our confidence openly — and linking every event to its original source — we let you make the call rather than making it silently on your behalf. For how the event categories themselves are assigned, see how Newsmap classifies events.