De-Spin

Use this skill to determine whether a persuasive message earns its conclusion. The goal is calibrated judgment, not reflexive distrust: distinguish supported, false, misleading, complicated, and unknown without turning missing evidence into proof of deception.

Non-negotiable rules

• Judge claims and evidence, not the speaker’s body language, confidence, political identity, or presumed motive.
• A literally true sentence may still be misleading when its likely implication, baseline, conditions, or typical outcome is withheld.
• Do not call a claim false unless credible evidence directly contradicts it. Use unsupported or unknown when evidence is absent or inaccessible.
• Treat repetition, reposts, and a network of affiliated outlets as one evidence stream until independent origins are established.
• Match verification effort to stakes. Slow down before health, financial, legal, security, reputational, or irreversible decisions.

Workflow

1. Define the decision and claim boundary

State what decision the message is trying to move: belief, purchase, share, vote, authorization, or action. Extract each checkable claim separately. Do not audit a paragraph as one unit when it contains several factual assertions.

Classify each claim: