# Fact-Checking

> Fact-Checking is mapped as the signal: it selects, frames, verifies, amplifies, distracts, and archives political reality.

| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Stable ID | `node:kiduna:political-change:media-information:fact-checking` |
| Family | Media & Information Power |
| Domain | Information |
| Kind | mechanism |
| Archetypal function | The Signal |
| Epistemic status | synthesis; supported |

## Concrete anchor

Fact-Checking belongs to the **Media & Information Power** family. It is treated as a specific political object, role, institution, tactic, event, ideology, or mechanism before any symbolic transfer is made.

## What it does

Fact-Checking selects, frames, verifies, amplifies, distracts, and archives political reality, changing who can act, what becomes visible, and which costs are distributed to others.

## Who gains and who loses power

The mechanism can increase the capacity of actors able to use Fact-Checking, while shifting cost, delay, risk, exclusion, or dependence toward actors with less authority, information, organization, money, or safe access. The distribution is conditional, not an essence of the node.

## Archetypal function

**The Signal.** Fact-Checking is mapped as the signal: it selects, frames, verifies, amplifies, distracts, and archives political reality.

## Gift

makes distant action public and enables accountability; through Fact-Checking, that capacity becomes available for deliberate use.

## Wound / Shadow

rewards outrage, ownership power, propaganda, and attention capture; Fact-Checking can then reproduce the very arrangement it claims to change.

## Conditions

- scale and jurisdiction are explicit
- affected people and absent stakeholders are named
- time horizon and countermoves are considered

## Strategic meaning

Use Fact-Checking to identify the operative target, resource, dependency, decision forum, and likely countermove. Ask what would make the mechanism stronger, weaker, more legitimate, or less necessary.

## Divinatory meaning

The Signal enters through Fact-Checking. Read for the capacity seeking expression, the cost displaced from view, and the relationship that changes if the frame moves.

**Question:** What changes when Fact-Checking becomes the unit of analysis rather than background?

## Game function

**leverage.** Reveal one hidden dependency connected to Fact-Checking; another player names a countermove. Initiative 1.

## Relationships

- **legitimizes — News Desert:** News Desert legitimizes Fact-Checking by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(synthesis; supported)_
- **mobilizes — Information Operation:** Fact-Checking mobilizes Information Operation by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(synthesis; supported)_
- **depends on — Subsidiarity:** Fact-Checking depends on Subsidiarity by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_
- **legitimizes — Policy Window:** Policy Window legitimizes Fact-Checking by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_

## Countermaps and polarity prompts

- Read Fact-Checking from the viewpoint of the actor who bears its cost.
- Reverse cause and symptom: what if Fact-Checking is an effect of the system it appears to drive?
- Change the clock: what looks different over a day, an election cycle, a generation, and a century?
- Ask when the Gift becomes the Wound through scale, secrecy, intensity, latency, or unequal reciprocity.

## Epistemic and Sentinel note

Claim layers: synthesis, interpretive, symbolic_divinatory. Scope, jurisdiction, period, and source perspective may change the claim.
No node-specific Sentinel factors were recorded; ordinary source, audience, and context checks still apply.

## Visual direction

A text-free enamel expression of Fact-Checking: one dominant mechanism, one counterforce, raised warm-metal linework, midnight field, restrained civic red, teal, ivory, and amber. No party logo, national flag, sacred symbol, or recognizable person.

## Research / provenance

- [Guidance for Regulation of Digital Platforms](https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000387339) — UNESCO, 2023. Platform governance, expression, information integrity, and rights.
- [Church Committee Reports](https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigations/church-committee.htm) — U.S. Senate, 1975–1976. Investigations of intelligence abuses and subsequent oversight reforms.

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Engine Output version 1.0.0; generated 2026-08-24T00:00:00Z. Sentinel annotations are stored separately in `sentinel/handoffs.json`.
