Source Reliability & Spin · Headline & Half-Truths · Intent & Indoctrination · Truth & Persuasion Techniques - the four-letter framework that catches media manipulation in 60 seconds. Left, right, center... we don't care who's shoveling it. We just tell you how deep it is.
Learn the Framework →Think about every skill you've ever been formally taught. Reading, writing, arithmetic. Maybe cooking. Maybe coding. Someone sat you down and said "here's how this works, here's how to get better at it, and here's what to watch out for."
Now think about media consumption. You spend three to seven hours a day doing it. It shapes your worldview, your politics, your relationships, your anxiety levels, your sense of what's true. It's probably the single most influential activity in your daily life.
And nobody ever taught you how to do it well.
Not once. Not in elementary school. Not in high school. Not in college. You got a "media literacy" unit in seventh grade where a teacher told you to "consider your sources" and then moved on to the Civil War. That's it. That was the whole education.
You can play Hot Cross Buns on a recorder. Congratulations. Can you tell when a statistic has been stripped of its context to make you afraid? Can you spot the difference between a news article and an opinion piece wearing a news article's clothes? Can you identify which emotions a piece of content was engineered to trigger before those emotions hijack your judgment?
Those aren't rhetorical questions. Those are skills. Specific, practicable, improvable skills. Just like cooking, just like coding, just like anything else worth getting good at.
When you first learn to cook, you burn everything. You follow recipes to the letter and it still comes out wrong. Then one day you start tasting as you go. You learn what "a pinch" actually means. You develop instincts. Eventually you can open a fridge, see random ingredients, and improvise something good.
SHIT works the same way.
Stage 1: Unconscious consumption. This is where most people are. Content goes in, emotions come out, and you never question the pipeline between those two events. You share posts because of how the headline made you feel. You form opinions based on whatever your feed showed you that morning. You're not dumb. You just never learned to look for the machinery.
Stage 2: Awareness. This is where it starts. You read a headline and something feels off, but you can't articulate why. You notice yourself getting angry at an article and think "wait, am I supposed to be angry right now?" You start pausing before you share. This stage is uncomfortable. It's supposed to be.
Stage 3: Analytical. Now you can name what's happening. "That's a half-truth, they left out the comparison data." "This headline doesn't match the article." "That's in-group/out-group framing." You're slow at it. You have to think through each check deliberately. Like a new cook reading every line of the recipe. But you're catching things you never would have caught before.
Stage 4: Instinctive. The framework becomes automatic. You read a headline and your brain runs the checks without being asked. You watch a TikTok and you clock the ominous music, the rapid cuts, the text overlay trick before the video even finishes. You develop what experienced journalists call "a nose for it." Except now everyone can have that nose, not just people who went to J-school.
Most people never get past Stage 1 because nobody told them Stage 2 existed. The SHIT framework gives you the vocabulary. Practice gives you the reps. And like any skill, the reps are what make you good.
Here's something nobody in media wants to admit: you don't have a misinformation problem. You have a manipulation problem.
Most of the content designed to make you angry, scared, or tribal isn't technically lying. That's what makes it so effective. The headlines are worded just carefully enough. The stats are real but cherry-picked. The quotes are accurate but ripped from context so aggressively they'd need a chiropractor.
And it works on everyone. Progressives share articles with missing context just as often as conservatives share articles with loaded framing. The algorithm doesn't care about your politics. It cares about your attention. And outrage, fear, and tribal belonging are the three cheapest ways to get it.
You've probably felt it yourself. You read a headline that made your blood boil. You shared it. Then three days later, you saw the full story and thought, "Huh. That was... different than I thought."
That moment? That's SHIT.
Source Reliability & Spin. Headline & Half-Truths. Intent & Indoctrination. Truth & Persuasion Techniques. Four checks, eight red flags, and once you learn to spot them, you can't unsee them. Like finding a hair in your food at a restaurant. Except the restaurant is your entire information diet, and the hair is everywhere.
This is the whole system. Four letters, two checks each, eight total red flags. You can memorize it in five minutes and use it for the rest of your life. No app required. No subscription. Just a mental checklist that works on every piece of content you'll ever consume.
The beauty of this framework is that it doesn't care about ideology. It cares about technique. A left-leaning outlet using fear tactics gets flagged the same as a right-leaning outlet burying counter-evidence. Manipulation is manipulation. Period.
Is this source credible? Do they have a track record of corrections, retractions, or known bias? Then: is the framing neutral, or is it quietly steering you toward a conclusion before you've seen the evidence?
Does the headline actually match the article? (You'd be shocked how often it doesn't.) Are the facts technically accurate but selected so carefully that the overall picture is misleading?
Is this trying to inform you or activate you? There's a difference between "here's what happened" and "here's why you should be furious." We also check for in-group/out-group language, the "us vs. them" framing that turns news into tribalism.
What's missing? Every story has angles that got left out. We flag the gaps. Then we check for classic manipulation moves: emotional appeals disguised as logic, false urgency, appeal to authority, and the rest of the rhetorical trick bag.
Each check is binary. Clean or red flag. No mushy "somewhat concerning" hedging. Either the content does the thing, or it doesn't. Your final score tells you exactly how much SHIT you're dealing with.
Print it. Screenshot it. Tattoo it on your forearm. The next time you're scrolling your feed at 11 PM and something makes you want to rage-share, run the four letters in your head. S - H - I - T. It takes sixty seconds and it will save you from being someone else's useful idiot.
The real goal isn't an app or a website. It's rewiring how your brain processes media. These are skills, not secrets. You can start practicing them right now, on the next thing you scroll past.
Before you click, before you scroll, ask yourself one question: "What conclusion does this headline want me to reach?" If you can feel it pulling you somewhere, that pull is worth investigating. Good journalism gives you information. Manipulation gives you a destination.
Try it tonight. Open your preferred news app, social feed, or group chat. Read the first five headlines. For each one, write down the emotion it's trying to trigger. Anger? Fear? Smugness? Moral superiority? You'll be disturbed by how obvious the pattern is once you look for it.
Whatever your gut reaction is to a story, force yourself to articulate the strongest version of the opposing view. Not a strawman. The real argument. If you can't do it, you probably don't understand the issue well enough yet. And that's fine! That's actually useful information.
This is the hardest skill to build because your brain actively fights it. We're wired for confirmation. Every time you encounter information that supports what you already believe, your brain gives you a little dopamine hit. Questioning your own side feels like work because it literally is.
This is the big one. The most powerful form of manipulation isn't lying. It's omission. A story about a policy's costs that never mentions its benefits. A profile of a controversy that only quotes one side. A statistic presented without the comparison data that would give it meaning.
Every time you finish reading something, ask: "Who would disagree with this, and what would they say?" If the piece never addressed that, you just found the SHIT.
If you feel outraged, scared, or smug after consuming a piece of content, those emotions aren't accidental. They were engineered. That doesn't mean the content is wrong. But it does mean you should slow down before you hit share.
The share button is the most powerful weapon in modern propaganda. And they've made it feel weightless on purpose.
Like any skill, SHIT has levels. Most people are stuck at Level 1 and don't know it. Figure out where you are, then use the roadmap to level up.
You read headlines and react. You share things because of how they made you feel. You've never once asked "what did this article leave out?" Your opinions were installed by your feed and you think you arrived at them independently.
Signs you're here: You've shared something and later found out it was misleading. You argue about articles you didn't finish. You think media bias only exists on the other side. Your blood pressure rises every time you open a news app.
You've started noticing that some headlines feel... off. You can't always explain why, but your gut is beginning to flag things. You occasionally pause before sharing. You've caught yourself mid-outrage and thought "wait, is this real?"
Signs you're here: You sometimes check if a headline matches the article. You've Googled something to verify before sharing it. You've noticed the same story framed completely differently by two sources.
How to level up: Learn the four letters. Start with H - Headline & Half-Truths. For one week, read every article you'd normally just scan the headline of. Compare the headline's claim to what the article actually says. You'll be shocked how often they don't match. That shock is your SHIT instinct waking up.
You can name the techniques. "That's a half-truth - they left out the comparison data." "This headline doesn't match the article." "That's tribal framing." You run the checks deliberately, like a new cook following a recipe. It's slow, but you catch things you never would have caught before.
Signs you're here: You can identify which letter of SHIT a piece of content fails on. You've caught manipulation from your own favorite sources. You've explained the framework to someone else. Your sharing has dropped dramatically because most things don't pass the smell test.
How to level up: Focus on T - Truth & Persuasion Techniques. Start asking "what's missing?" after everything you read. Every story omits something. Find it. Read the same story from three different sources and notice what each one leaves out. Then start catching the persuasion tricks: false urgency, emotional appeals wearing logic costumes, appeal to unnamed authorities. This is where you develop range.
The framework runs automatically. You read a headline and your brain flags the manipulation before you finish the sentence. You watch a TikTok and clock the ominous music, the rapid cuts, the text overlay trick before the video ends. You developed what journalists call "a nose for it" - except now you don't need a journalism degree to have one.
Signs you're here: You spot manipulation in real-time without consciously running the checks. Your friends send you articles and ask "is this legit?" You're harder to upset because you see the emotion engineering before it lands. You consume less media overall but understand more.
How to level up: Teach someone else. Seriously. The best way to master SHIT is to explain it to someone who's never heard of it. Find a Level 1 in your life - they're everywhere - and walk them through the framework using content they care about. When you can diagnose SHIT on the fly in a live conversation, you've graduated.
You don't just spot SHIT - you understand why it was made. You see the business model behind the manipulation. You understand that the outrage article exists because outrage gets clicks, clicks sell ads, and ads pay salaries. You see the content ecosystem as a system, not a series of individual bad actors.
At this level, you're not angry at media anymore. You're not even disappointed. You understand the incentive structure and you've opted out of being fuel for it. You consume information on your terms, from sources you've vetted, and you help others do the same.
Signs you're here: People come to you before sharing things. You can explain both sides of any issue better than most partisans can explain their own. You've converted at least one Rage-Sharer into a critical thinker. Your information diet is smaller, calmer, and more accurate than anyone you know. You read a manipulative headline and your first thought isn't outrage - it's "who paid for this and what do they want?"
You knew too much. You saw the whole machine - who funds it, who benefits, how every outrage cycle is manufactured and sold. You started asking questions that made powerful people uncomfortable. You connected dots that weren't supposed to be connected.
Your last known message was a group text that read "guys I figured out why they-" and then nothing.
Signs you're here: You're not. Nobody is. Everyone who reached Level 6 died in unrelated accidents that were completely normal and definitely not suspicious. Please stop asking about Level 6. There is no Level 6. This section doesn't exist. Keep scrolling.
Be honest with yourself about where you are. Most people reading this are Level 1 or 2. That's not an insult - it's a starting point. The fact that you're on this page at all means you're already moving. The gap between levels isn't talent or intelligence. It's reps. Put in the reps and you'll climb faster than you think.
These patterns are everywhere - in your news feed, your group chats, the videos your algorithm serves you at midnight. Once you see them spelled out, you'll start noticing them in every scroll session. Sorry in advance.
The actual article cites one think-tank analyst (not plural "experts") who said the policy "could create challenges for some small businesses in the short term." The word "destroy" appears nowhere in any quote. The headline manufactured a crisis that the reporting doesn't support.
True. But crime dropped 60% over the previous three years, making the current rate still well below the 5-year average. The stat is accurate. The impression it creates is a lie. That's SHIT at its finest.
The actual information in the video is publicly available budget data. The music, pacing, and text overlays manufacture a conspiracy atmosphere around boring, accessible public records. The content isn't wrong. The packaging is pure manipulation.
States the fact. Acknowledges both sides briefly. Points to the primary source so you can read it yourself. No adjectives doing emotional labor. No unnamed "experts." This is what clean reporting looks like.
You know these people. You might be one of them. No judgment - most of us are, because nobody ever taught us otherwise.
The Rage-Sharer. Reads a headline, blood pressure spikes, hits share before finishing the first paragraph. Their feed is a graveyard of articles they never actually read. They're not spreading information - they're spreading emotions. And the algorithm loves them for it because every rage-share trains the machine to serve more rage.
The Bubble Dweller. Only consumes content that confirms what they already believe. Every source they trust happens to agree with them on everything. What a coincidence. They think they're "well-informed" because they read a lot. But reading a lot of the same angle isn't research - it's reinforcement. It's like saying you have a diverse diet because you eat at five different McDonald's.
The Headline Debater. Has strong opinions about articles they've only read the title of. Will argue for twenty minutes about a story they spent four seconds on. When you ask "did you read the whole thing?" they pivot to "well, the point still stands." The point doesn't stand. The point never left the headline.
The Screenshot Warrior. Shares cropped screenshots of tweets, texts, and articles with zero context. A quote without context is just words doing whatever the screenshot-taker wants them to do. It's the informational equivalent of cutting someone's sentence in half and pretending that's what they said.
The "Do Your Research" Person. Tells everyone to "do their own research" but their research is watching YouTube videos from people who agree with them. Actual research involves reading things that challenge your position. If your "research" never makes you uncomfortable, you're not researching - you're shopping for confirmation.
The Both-Sides Denier. Fully convinced that manipulation only happens on the other team. Their sources are clean, their media is honest, and anyone who suggests otherwise is brainwashed. This person is the easiest to manipulate because they've already decided they're immune. Nobody who thinks they can't be fooled is paying attention.
of people think they're better than average at spotting misinformation. That math doesn't work. And that overconfidence is exactly what makes manipulation so effective.
None of these people are stupid. That's the thing. They're smart, capable, often successful people who never learned one specific skill. You wouldn't call someone dumb for not knowing how to cook if nobody ever showed them a kitchen. SHIT is the same thing - it's a skill nobody taught, and the people who profit from your ignorance are counting on it staying that way.
The good news? Every single one of these patterns disappears once you get good at SHIT. The Rage-Sharer starts pausing. The Bubble Dweller starts branching out. The Headline Debater starts reading. Not because someone shamed them into it - but because once you can see the manipulation, participating in it feels embarrassing. Like finding out you've been clapping at the wrong moments during a concert. Once you know, you just... stop.
The archetypes above are funny until they're not. Because weak SHIT doesn't just make you annoying on social media. Left unchecked, it escalates. And the escalation follows a pattern so predictable it might as well be a script.
It starts small. You follow a few accounts that make you feel something. Outrage, fear, righteous anger - doesn't matter which flavor. The algorithm notices. It serves you more. Your feed slowly becomes a single emotion on repeat, and you don't notice the shift because each individual post seems reasonable. It's the accumulation that changes you.
You start spending more time online. Not because you decided to, but because every time you open your phone, something urgent is waiting. Something that needs your attention. Something that confirms the world is exactly as bad as you suspected. The dopamine loop tightens. You check your phone 90 times a day and every check reinforces the same narrative.
Your conversations change. Everything becomes about the thing - the issue, the outrage, the cause. Friends start avoiding certain topics around you. Then they start avoiding you. Your family walks on eggshells. Someone you've known for twenty years says "you've changed" and you think they're the problem. They haven't woken up. They don't see what you see.
Except what you see has been curated by an algorithm optimized for engagement, fed through sources optimized for clicks, and framed by people who profit from your anger. You didn't arrive at your worldview. You were led to it, one emotionally manipulated headline at a time.
Americans have cut off a friend or family member over politics. Not over genuine moral disagreements - over manufactured outrage built on incomplete information that neither person verified.
Then comes the moment. The rally. The protest. The march. The thing that feels like doing something.
And here's where it gets dark: the same media machine that radicalized you now films you. You're not the audience anymore - you're the content. You're the footage that gets cut, edited, and framed to radicalize someone on the other side. Your face ends up in someone else's feed as proof that "those people" are dangerous, unhinged, a threat. A producer somewhere selects the angriest 8 seconds of your day and broadcasts it to millions.
You showed up because you believed something needed to change. You became a pawn in a content cycle designed to generate more anger, more clicks, more engagement. Both sides of the media ecosystem thank you for the material.
Your sister doesn't call anymore. Your college roommate muted you six months ago. Your kids have a group chat you're not in where they discuss "what to do about mom/dad." Your coworkers have learned which topics are landmines. The person you were five years ago would barely recognize the person you are now - not because you grew, but because you were slowly, methodically narrowed.
And the cruelest part? You're not wrong about everything. There are real problems. Real injustices. Real things worth being angry about. But the SHIT-soaked media you consumed didn't give you accurate information about those problems. It gave you a caricature. It took real issues and inflated them, stripped their nuance, removed the counterarguments, and served them to you as emergencies that required your outrage right now.
You had real concerns. SHIT turned them into a personality.
Every person in that spiral started the same way: consuming media without the skills to see the manipulation. That's it. They weren't dumber than you. They weren't weaker. They just never learned SHIT.
The distance between "normal person scrolling their phone" and "someone who lost friends and showed up at a rally they can't fully explain" isn't a cliff. It's a slow ramp. And the only thing that stops the slide is the ability to look at a piece of content and ask: is this informing me, or is it activating me?
That's the I in SHIT. And it might be the most important letter.
Once you internalize the SHIT framework, it doesn't just change how you read the news. It changes how you move through every screen you touch.
That group chat where someone drops a screenshot of a headline with "can you BELIEVE this?!" - you'll notice the headline is doing emotional labor the article doesn't support. That video in your feed with the ominous music and ALL CAPS text overlay - you'll clock the manipulation before the video even finishes. That "breaking" notification from a news app designed to make you tap immediately - you'll feel the urgency and recognize it as engineered.
It's not just political content. It's health advice that cherry-picks one study out of two hundred. It's financial "news" that manufactures urgency to get you to buy or sell. It's outrage content about strangers on the internet that exists purely to make you feel morally superior for three seconds before the algorithm serves you the next hit.
SHIT is the operating system of the attention economy. And once you see the code, you can't unsee it.
The average person spends this much time per day consuming media. Without the SHIT framework, that's 3–7 hours of unfiltered manipulation flowing straight into your worldview.
The shift is subtle at first. Then it's everywhere.
Scrolling your feed: You start noticing how many posts are engineered to trigger a reaction rather than convey information. The rage-share impulse fades. You stop being free labor for other people's engagement metrics.
Group chats: When someone shares something inflammatory, instead of piling on or arguing, you can point to the technique. "The headline says 'destroyed' but the actual quote says 'challenged.'" You're not calling anyone stupid. You're both looking at the same breakdown.
Conversations with people you disagree with: Instead of "you're wrong," it becomes "we're both getting played." That's a fundamentally different starting point. One leads to a fight. The other leads to a conversation.
See the difference? You're not calling them stupid. You're not dismissing their concern. You're using shared vocabulary to talk about the quality of the information instead of attacking each other. The SHIT framework gives you neutral ground. It turns "you're wrong" into "we're both getting played."
The most powerful thing about this framework is that it hits your side too. And that's what makes it work.
The first time you catch an article from your favorite source using half-truths and emotional framing? That stings. Your brain will try to explain it away. "Well, they're basically right even if the framing is..." Stop. That's the manipulation working. That's the whole reason the SHIT framework exists.
When you start catching manipulation from sources you trust - not just sources you already disagreed with - that's when you know the skill is real. That's when it stops being a partisan weapon and starts being a genuine superpower.
Because a country full of people who are difficult to manipulate is the most dangerous thing imaginable to everyone who profits from keeping you stupid and angry. And every time someone pauses before rage-sharing, the algorithm loses a tiny piece of its power.
That's how SHIT changes everything. One flush at a time.
Here's the counterintuitive move that will do more for your media literacy than anything else on this page: go find somebody who consumes completely different media than you. And start comparing notes on purpose.
Not to argue. Not to convert them. Not to prove you're right. To train.
Think about how every other skill works. A chess player doesn't get better by playing against themselves. A boxer doesn't improve by punching air. A programmer doesn't level up by only reading code they already understand. You get better by going up against someone who sees things differently, who catches the blind spots you can't see because they're YOUR blind spots.
That friend who watches completely different news? That coworker who's always sharing stuff you roll your eyes at? They're not your opponents. They're your training partners. They consume completely different manipulative content than you do, which means they're experts at spotting the SHIT you swallow without noticing, and you're an expert at spotting theirs.
Never say "you fell for that." Say "look at what that article did to both of us." The second you make it about intelligence or gullibility, the conversation is over and you're just two people with hurt feelings and no new information.
Before you critique anything from their media diet, run something from yours. Out loud. In front of them. Nothing builds trust faster than saying "look, my favorite source used a half-truth here." You just showed that you're not here to win. You're here to see clearly. That changes the whole temperature of the room.
When an article makes you angry, that anger is useful information. It tells you the content was designed to make you angry. Say that out loud. "This made me furious. Let's figure out whether it earned that reaction or manufactured it." Emotions aren't the enemy. Unexamined emotions are.
When you spot a half-truth or omission, don't just note it. Actually go find what was left out. Together. Two people with different media diets searching for the full picture will find it ten times faster than either of you alone. That's the whole point of having a sparring partner.
This one is hard and that's why it matters. When you find manipulation from a source you trust, don't get defensive. Get excited. You just leveled up. You just proved SHIT works on everything, not just the stuff you already disagreed with. That's the skill. That's the whole game.
Try this: once a week, you and your sparring partner each bring one article from your own media world. Run them both through the SHIT checks. Discuss what you find. No yelling. No converting. Just two people getting better at seeing manipulation, from every direction. Do it for a month and watch what happens to your conversations. Watch what happens to the trust between you. Watch what happens to the quality of information you start demanding from your own sources.
This is the part nobody talks about when they talk about "bridging the divide." They frame it as compromise. As meeting in the middle. As if you need to give up your values to get along with somebody who sees things differently.
That's not what this is. This is two people keeping their values, keeping their opinions, keeping their perspectives, and jointly refusing to let bad-faith media make those differences worse than they actually are. You're not agreeing on policy. You're agreeing that you both deserve better information. That's a much easier handshake.
Your sparring partner sees the tricks your side uses that you've gone blind to. You see the tricks their side uses that they've gone blind to. Together, you become very difficult to manipulate. And a world full of people who are difficult to manipulate? That's the most dangerous thing imaginable to everyone who profits from keeping you stupid and angry.
So go text that friend. Message that coworker. Reconnect with someone you've been avoiding because you "disagree on everything." Don't say "let's talk politics." Say "hey, want to talk SHIT?" They'll laugh. Then you explain the framework. And just like that, the most loaded conversation in America becomes the most disarming one. You're not debating politics. You're just talking SHIT together.
It's way easier to bond over a Shartocalypse score than over ideology.
You don't need a tool to use the SHIT framework. It lives in your head. But if you want to sharpen your skills faster - or just see a professional-grade breakdown of any piece of content - we built an analyzer that runs all eight checks in about 30 seconds.
Think of it like training wheels. Or a sparring dummy. It runs the reps so you can see what expert-level SHIT looks like in practice, until you internalize the patterns yourself.
Paste a URL. Paste raw text. Drop in a Reddit link. Or screen-record a TikTok, Reel, or Short (with captions on) and upload the video. It eats everything.
The tool pulls the full text, transcript, on-screen text, visual cues, and even the emotional tone of background music in videos. Then it runs all eight SHIT checks with specific evidence for every flag.
You see your rating, a point-by-point breakdown with highlighted quotes and timestamps that triggered each flag, the detected political lean (if any), and the counter-arguments the content left out. Share the score card with anyone. Watch the conversation change.
The goal is to make yourself obsolete with this tool. Use it enough and you'll start running the checks automatically in your head. That's when you know SHIT has become instinct. That's when you've graduated from consumer to practitioner.
We made it crude on purpose. Media literacy shouldn't feel like homework. It should stick in your brain like a jingle you can't shake. So every piece of content gets a rating on our scientifically calibrated (okay, not scientifically) Poop Scale.
Pristine. Balanced, full context, minimal agenda. Rare and beautiful. You found a unicorn. Cherish it.
Mostly solid, just a tiny streak of spin. Consume with mild awareness.
Noticeable issues. It'll hold up under scrutiny, but bring extra toilet paper. Cross-reference recommended.
Heavy omissions and loaded framing. You'll be cleaning up misinformation for a while.
Messy emotional hooks and sketchy sources. Don't trust it without backup. Don't sit on white furniture.
Burning urgency, fear tactics, tribal bait. This content was designed to make you angry, not informed.
Liquid chaos. Almost every check fails. The informational equivalent of a gas station bathroom.
Total disaster. Full propaganda mode. Trust at your own risk. This content is working overtime to play you.
Because Reddit is where headlines go to get rewritten by strangers with agendas. Drop any Reddit link and the tool analyzes the post, compares the Reddit title against the actual source headline (this delta alone is wild), scores the comment ecosystem for dominant narratives, and flags when dissenting views are getting buried. Turns out the real SHIT was the editorialized titles we made along the way.
Analyzer Coming SoonMost tools stop at the post. This one doesn't. Drop any X/Twitter link and you get two things: the standard SHIT score on the post itself, plus a full credibility profile of the person who posted it.
That means it pulls their last 200 tweets and actually reads them. It checks how often they post (30+ times a day across all time zones isn't human behavior). It looks at their original content ratio (all retweets, no original thought = amplifier account). It checks if they ever acknowledge the other side of an argument, or if it's rage content 100% of the time.
Then it rates the account on a credibility scale:
Real person, diverse posting, acknowledges complexity, corrects mistakes when wrong. The kind of account worth following.
Real person, clearly pushing a viewpoint. Not lying, but you're only getting one side. Think commentators, activists, advocates. Not bad. Just... know what you're getting.
Optimized for virality, not truth. Rage-bait, hot takes, manufactured outrage. May be a real person, but they treat X like a slot machine and your emotions are the coins.
Bot-like patterns. Coordinated messaging. Fake followers. Brand new account pushing narratives hard. Proceed with the caution you'd give a gas station sushi roll.
Account is clearly satirical. Content isn't meant to be taken at face value, and the profile signals that. Flagged so you don't accidentally score The Babylon Bee like it's Reuters.
The combination is what makes this powerful. A Mud Butt post from a Verified Human might just be a bad take from someone who's usually trustworthy. A Ghost Wipe post from a Suspicious Account might be a broken clock being right at noon. Context changes everything, and the profile score gives you that context.
This is where most manipulation lives now. Not in 2,000-word articles. In 30-second videos with dramatic music, rapid cuts, and text overlays designed to bypass your critical thinking entirely.
Screen-record any TikTok, Reel, or YouTube Short. Turn on captions first if you can. Upload it. The tool transcribes every word, reads every text overlay, analyzes the editing pace and music tone, and scores the whole thing against the same eight checks.
That video someone shared about the "secret they don't want you to know?" It'll tell you exactly what techniques were used to make you feel like you'd uncovered hidden truth when you'd actually just watched someone with a ring light read publicly available information over ominous music.
Nothing stored. Nothing saved. Videos get processed and deleted. This isn't about collecting your data. It's about stopping other people from collecting your attention under false pretenses.
Yeah, probably. Everyone is. That's sort of the whole point.
But here's the difference: the framework doesn't score opinions. It scores techniques. It doesn't care if an article concludes that taxes should be higher or lower. It cares whether the article used selective data, emotional manipulation, misleading framing, or missing context to get you to that conclusion.
A well-argued progressive piece with full context, acknowledged counterpoints, and honest framing scores a Ghost Wipe. A well-argued conservative piece with the same rigor scores a Ghost Wipe. A sloppy hit job from either side scores Mud Butt or worse.
The entire methodology is open. The scoring criteria are transparent. If you think something's wrong, say so. We'll either fix it or explain why the check works the way it does. That's more transparency than the outlets you're consuming right now are offering, and that fact alone should concern you.
No. The framework is four letters and eight checks. Memorize it, use it in your head, teach it to your friends. The tool just automates the process and gives you detailed breakdowns to practice with. Think of the tool as the gym equipment - useful for training, but the muscles are yours.
Yes. Free tier gets you 10 analyses a day with no account required. That's enough to gut-check most of what hits your feed. Pro unlocks unlimited analyses, history tracking, and API access for $5/month.
The tool detects satirical intent. The Onion is clearly labeled as satire, and the analysis accounts for that. What it won't give a pass to is content that uses the aesthetics of humor or satire to sneak in genuine propaganda. That's a real thing and it's getting more common.
No. Videos are processed in temporary storage that auto-deletes within 15 minutes. We don't keep your content, we don't build profiles, and we don't sell data. We're a nonprofit - we exist to teach media literacy, not monetize your data.
Because media literacy is important and boring doesn't stick. You'll remember what "The Shartocalypse" means long after you forget the academic definition of "motivated reasoning." That's the point. We want this framework living rent-free in your head the next time you see a headline that makes your blood boil.
Please do. Education accounts get free unlimited access. We'd rather have a generation of kids who can spot manipulation than a generation of adults who can't. Email us for .edu access.
Share this page. Or just teach them the four letters: S-H-I-T. Source & Spin. Headline & Half-Truths. Intent & Indoctrination. Truth & Techniques. Once someone knows the acronym and the Poop Scale, the framework sells itself. Especially when you score something from their favorite source and they watch it light up like a Christmas tree.
Learn the framework. Practice the checks. Share it with everyone you know. The tool is here when you want reps - but the real goal is SHIT becoming a reflex you carry everywhere.
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