Terms of Use

Prism is a media-literacy tool. It takes one real news event, shows how it would be framed from five points on the political spectrum, shows the words each outlet chose, and lets you argue the trade-offs through with an AI.

Prism is not a news outlet. It employs no journalists and publishes no original reporting. Everything factual here is derived from other outlets’ public news feeds, and every story links back to them. Read the originals.

Prism is not authoritative. The account, the five framings, the placements, the notes and the debates are produced by an AI model. They can be wrong. They are a teaching device for noticing how framing works — not a verdict on any event, outlet, person or party.

Nearly all the writing on a story page is generated by an AI model (currently Anthropic’s Claude) and published without human review: the headline, the factual account, the five framings, the article placements, the framing notes, the tags, the chat replies and the debates.

• It may contain factual errors, including confident ones.
• It may misrepresent what an outlet meant.
• It does not represent anyone’s opinion about the events described.
• The viewpoint personas are AI syntheses of political traditions. They are not real people, not modelled on real people, and not authorised representatives of any party or movement.

Do not rely on anything here as a statement of fact, as advice of any kind, or as a substitute for reading the original sources. If you find something wrong, tell us — see corrections.

Story links, outlet names, quoted phrases, photographs and embedded video belong to the publishers who made them. They appear here to identify and comment on how those publishers covered a story, and every one links back.

Placements are opinion about an article, not about an outlet. Where Prism says a piece reads centre-left or centre-right, that is its reading of that article, shown alongside a quotation from the article that is checked to be a real substring of it before publication. It is a debatable judgment about words that were published. It is not an assertion that any outlet is dishonest, inaccurate, or acting in bad faith — and “centre” is not a compliment.

Framing notes describe words, never motives. They point at differences in published wording. They are not accusations of intent or deception against any publisher or journalist.

The Headline Tracker records that a headline changed, with the before and after. Headlines are rewritten for many ordinary reasons, and recording a change implies nothing improper.

Photographs are loaded from the publisher’s own servers, from the address in that publisher’s own public feed. Nothing is copied, re-hosted or altered, and no image is generated by AI. Images served directly by wire and stock agencies are refused. If you are a publisher and want your material out of Prism, contact usetheprism@gmail.com — it will be removed, and you do not need a lawyer to ask.

You may read, share, quote and link to anything on Prism, including for teaching. We would like that.

Please don’t:

• Scrape or bulk-download the site, or run automated tools against it beyond ordinary reading. It is rate-limited; please don’t work around that.
• Use the AI features to produce anything unlawful, harassing, or designed to defame a real person.
• Try to make the AI present itself as a real person, outlet or official source.
• Probe or disrupt the site or its infrastructure. Good-faith security research is welcome — contact usetheprism@gmail.com before and after.
• Present Prism’s AI output as human journalism, or as an outlet’s own words.

Traffic can be rate-limited or blocked at any time, without notice. There are no accounts, so in practice that means blocking traffic.

The parts of Prism we wrote — the design, the glossary, the backgrounders, the explanatory pages and the code — are ours. You may quote and link to Prism freely with attribution. Please don’t present it as your own, or use the name in a way that implies Prism endorses you.

The site is provided “as is” and “as available”, with no warranty of any kind, express or implied, including as to accuracy, completeness, fitness for a particular purpose, or uninterrupted availability. Specifically, there is no warranty that anything on this site is true.

To the fullest extent the law allows, the person who runs Prism is not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for any loss arising from reliance on anything published here. Some places do not allow these exclusions, in which case they apply only as far as that place permits.

We want to be told when we are wrong.

• A framing, note, placement or debate is wrong or unfair: use the feedback link on the page, or contact usetheprism@gmail.com. Say which story and what is wrong.
• You are a publisher and want your material removed: contact usetheprism@gmail.com. A good-faith request from a publisher about its own material will be acted on, whether or not it is framed as a formal legal notice.
• A story is about you and you believe it is defamatory: contact usetheprism@gmail.com with the address and what is false. It will be looked at promptly.

Prism links to news articles, displays images served by publishers, and embeds video that plays from publishers’ own YouTube channels. None of it is under our control and we are not responsible for it. Video loads through YouTube’s privacy-enhanced domain, but once it plays, YouTube’s terms and privacy policy apply.

See the Privacy Policy. In short: no accounts, no sign-in, no email collection, no tracking, and your IP address is hashed before it is stored.

Prism carries no advertising. If that ever changes, the Privacy Policy will be updated to describe it before any ad code runs.

These terms may change. If something that matters changes, the effective date changes with it. Continuing to use Prism after a change means accepting it.

These terms are governed by the laws of Oregon, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules.

Prism
usetheprism@gmail.com

See also How Prism works, which explains the method behind everything described here.