Our mission
Keep an accurate history.
Thonest is a public-interest project building a permanent, verifiable record of what people and organizations actually said — the exact words, the original source, the date, and where the outcome can be measured, what happened afterward.
What actually happens to a record
Every record goes through the same seven steps. Nothing is skipped for convenience, and no step depends on someone deciding a statement deserves to be believed.
- You paste a link. Anything said publicly — a post, an essay, a transcript, a filing.
- We read the source from the platform itself. X and TikTok hand back a post’s own text through their public endpoints; articles and blogs are fetched directly. That response is stored word-for-word, so you can read exactly what we received.
- Software reads the statement and proposes the fields: who said it, the exact wording, whether it’s a prediction, a commitment or an opinion, and — if it can be settled later — what would settle it and by when.
- The quote is checked against the source. Not for plausibility: we check the words literally appear in what the platform returned. If they don’t, the record is refused. A made-up quote attached to a real link cannot be published here.
- The account is checked too. The platform tells us which account published something, and we read it from them rather than from whoever submitted it. You cannot attach one person’s post to another person’s name.
- A person sees exactly what will be locked, and their only choices are lock or refuse. Review is not editorial power: the wording must match the source or the record is refused, and once locked nothing can be changed by anyone — not the submitter, not us. We also ask the Internet Archive for an independent copy — that often fails, and the record says so plainly rather than implying corroboration it doesn’t have.
- It’s fingerprinted onto a public blockchain within seconds. Anyone can confirm a record hasn’t been altered since — the check runs in your browser and reads from a public node, never from us.
Afterwards the record stays open to challenge. Anyone can dispute it, and the person it’s about gets priority; we answer within 72 hours and resolve within 14 days. Corrections are added on top and stay visible forever — the original is never edited, including when we were the ones who got it wrong.
What a record looks like
“If there exist AI systems that can perform 8 of the 10 tasks below by the end of 2027, as determined by our panel of judges, Gary will donate $2,000 to a charity of Miles’ choice; if AI can do fewer than 8, Miles will donate $20,000 to a charity of Gary’s choice.”
Every record carries its exact wording, its original source, when it was said and when we captured it, how the quote was checked, and a proof you can verify yourself against a public blockchain.
Why this matters
The record of what was said has never been easier to lose. Posts are edited or quietly deleted, links rot, video gets re-cut. And as synthetic media improves, “I never said that” becomes easier to claim and harder to disprove — for the people who said something, and for the people who didn’t.
Meanwhile more rests on that record than ever, with AI systems now answering questions about what someone said by reassembling whatever pages happen to still exist. When the record becomes unreliable, accountability doesn’t collapse dramatically — it quietly stops working. Nobody has to lie; it is enough that nothing can be checked.
How we do it
Four commitments govern every record. They are constraints on us, not features for you.
One
We preserve evidence. We don’t adjudicate truth.
Thonest is not a fact-checker and rates nobody’s honesty. We capture what was said, with its source and context, and let readers judge from evidence they can inspect.
Two
We measure only what is measurable.
Predictions with numbers and dates resolve objectively; dated commitments resolve with evidence; statements of values can’t resolve at all, so we preserve them and never score them. A number that looks precise but isn’t is worse than no number.
Three
Evidence is immutable. Interpretation is append-only.
The original record never changes. Corrections, disputes and revised conclusions are appended and stay permanently visible. We will get things wrong; hiding that would deserve less trust, not more.
Four
It must be checkable by people who don’t trust us.
Every record’s fingerprint is committed to a public blockchain, and anyone can confirm a record matches it without our involvement. A record only we can vouch for isn’t a record — it’s a claim. How to check us.
What makes this different
- No honesty score. Counts, sources and outcomes, each with the underlying records one tap away — never a verdict on a person.
- Accuracy is checked, not moderated. Nobody here decides whether a statement deserves to be recorded. The source decides: if the words aren’t in it, the record doesn’t exist.
- No token, and no chain of our own. We use a public ledger the way a notary uses a stamp: to prove nothing changed.
- Not for sale. Access to the data can be sold; influence over the record cannot. No payment removes a record or alters a resolution — and the archive is built so we couldn’t do it quietly even if we wanted to.
What we publish
- The record — 22 sourced statements and counting.
- Our methodology — how records are captured and resolved, and the limits of each layer.
- Cryptographic proofs — per-record proofs and every anchored batch in full, so the archive can be audited for retroactive edits.
- An open API — the same structured data the site runs on.
A record of what someone said before the outcome was known can only be created while the outcome is still unknown. It cannot be reconstructed later, by us or by anyone else — which is why every year this archive exists is a year no one can recreate.
Thonest doesn’t decide truth. It preserves evidence, tracks outcomes where they can be measured, and makes the entire history auditable.