Credit where the
evidence came from.
A standing commitment by SPEAC Social Inc., written in plain language so every line can be checked against the code as it runs and against the ledger below. It has not yet been reviewed by legal counsel; it will be before SPEAC opens beyond the beta. It is dated and versioned like SPEAC's privacy notice and terms.
The pledge
Every SPEAC finding rests on sources. Many of them are the work of journalists and researchers whose reporting settled the question. SPEAC pledges two things to them.
Credit now. Since 29 October 2026, the source line under a finding names the outlet and, where the page carries one, the journalist, instead of a bare domain. The credit is read from the page's own metadata. Nothing is asked of the publisher.
A share when SPEAC earns. Five percent of SPEAC's net revenue is set aside each year and paid to the publishers of original reporting and research, in proportion to how often their work was cited in SPEAC findings that year. Every eligible publisher is owed its share from the moment it is cited, whether or not it has ever spoken to SPEAC. Signing up only tells SPEAC where to send the money.
How the share is worked out
- The pool is five percent of net revenue (revenue after taxes and payment-processing fees) for each calendar year.
- Eligible are publishers of original reporting and research: news organizations, independent journalists, fact-checking organizations, think tanks, scholarly journals and university research.
- Credited but not paid are governments, courts, regulators, elections bodies, intergovernmental organizations, and any organization reporting its own facts, such as a company, a league or a registry. They win by getting their information out, and a payment would look like something it isn't.
- Syndication: when a story or release is cited through a site that re-published it, the share belongs to the originator, not the host.
- A publisher's share is its eligible citations divided by all eligible citations in the year. The same count is used for everyone, computed after the fact from the findings as published. Nobody's share depends on who else has claimed.
- Payouts are made once a year, after the year's ledger is published here. Shares under $25 carry forward until they cross that line.
- Unclaimed shares are held for twelve months after the ledger is published so a publisher that comes forward later collects what it was owed. After that, they are paid to a journalism fund named here before the first payout. SPEAC never keeps money it has pledged away.
What can never be bought
Citations are chosen by SPEAC's editorial rules alone, from what the evidence supports. No agreement, payment, partnership or licence can earn a source preference, and the same rules apply to every source, partner or not. A publisher that gives SPEAC access to its archive gets better evidence read, not a thumb on the scale. This wall is the reason the pledge can exist: a share paid for citations is only honest if the citations cannot be influenced by the share.
A finding may still be wrong, and a cited publisher may disagree with it. Any publisher cited in a finding can ask for a correction or an update by email, and SPEAC will answer.
How to claim a share
Email ntrepanier@speacsocial.com from a publisher address with the name of the publication and where payment should go. That is the whole process. There is no form, no contract and no exclusivity. You can also ask, at any time, how often your work has been cited.
The ledger, 2026 to date
SPEAC has no revenue yet, so the 2026 pool is zero. The ledger is published anyway so the shares are visible before any money exists. Since the beta opened in July, SPEAC findings have cited 604 sources across 253 checked posts: 171 of them (28%) are governments and other bodies reporting their own facts, credited and not paid; 6 came through syndication hosts and are counted toward their originators; 427 are eligible. The largest shares so far:
| Publisher | Citations | Share of pool |
|---|---|---|
| CBC News cbc.ca | 31 | 7.3% |
| NPR npr.org | 13 | 3.0% |
| arXiv arxiv.org | 11 | 2.6% |
| CNBC cnbc.com | 11 | 2.6% |
| Al Jazeera aljazeera.com | 11 | 2.6% |
| The Globe and Mail theglobeandmail.com | 10 | 2.3% |
| NBC News nbcnews.com | 7 | 1.6% |
| CNN cnn.com | 6 | 1.4% |
| BNN Bloomberg bnnbloomberg.ca | 6 | 1.4% |
| National Observer nationalobserver.com | 6 | 1.4% |
| ScienceDirect (Elsevier) sciencedirect.com | 6 | 1.4% |
| Global News globalnews.ca | 6 | 1.4% |
| Britannica britannica.com | 5 | 1.2% |
| Forbes forbes.com | 5 | 1.2% |
| PBS pbs.org | 5 | 1.2% |
| TIME time.com | 5 | 1.2% |
| All other eligible publishers (about 300) | 283 | 66.3% |
Counts are by cited page, from the findings as published. The eligible / credited-only sorting is reviewed by hand and corrected when wrong; tell us if yours is. The full count by publisher is available on request.
Changes
This pledge is dated and versioned. A later version will be posted here with its date and a line saying what changed, and earlier versions will stay reachable. The percentage, the minimum payout and the holding period can go up; they will not go down for a year already ledgered.