Methodology · registry v2026-11-06
About the Tracker: Methodology and Ownership
By Influish Editorial Team · Published · Last updated
Short answer
Doomscroller News Tracker is a dated record of how the Influish doomscroller story was reported. It is published by Influish — the company in the story — and it does not report news of its own. Every entry is either a news report we loaded and read, or something we observed directly on an official channel, and each carries the date we checked it.
Ownership
Who publishes this tracker?
The tracker is published by Influish and maintained by the Influish Editorial Team. Influish posted the doomscroller video, so it has an obvious interest in how the story is told. To keep that interest from shaping the record, we follow three rules: we use no information that Influish has not made public; we attribute every claim to an outside report or a public page; and where reports conflict, we show each version rather than choosing the one the company might prefer.
We are not a news organisation, and we are not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by any outlet listed here. Publisher names appear only to credit and locate their reporting; we do not reproduce their text, images or logos.
Method
How is each report verified?
- Fetch. Each article is loaded directly. Where an automated fetch is blocked, it is retried with a standard browser request. For example, the India Today report was read this way.
- Record metadata from the page itself. Canonical address, headline, author, and publication and update times come from the page’s link tags, article meta tags and NewsArticle structured data — not from search snippets.
- Normalise times. All times are shown in IST. Where a page gives no timezone (as Salam Hindustan does), we assume IST and mark it.
- Extract claims in our own words. Hindi, Marathi and Malayalam reports are translated and summarised. Headlines are quoted as titles; article bodies are not reproduced.
- Compare. A claim made by two or more independent verified reports is a consensus fact. A claim in only one report, or reported differently, is labelled single-source or conflicting.
- Check primary sources. influish.com, the @gangsofstartup Instagram account and the doomscroller.influish.com address (including a DNS lookup) are checked directly.
- Sweep for more coverage. Google News RSS, Bing News RSS and web search are queried for the company and story names. New items are added as verified only if their pages load.
Labels
What do the status labels mean?
| Label | Meaning | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Verified | Page loaded; metadata and claims recorded from it. | 9 |
| Unverified · 403 | Page listed in news indexes but refused to load (HTTP 403). Headline recorded; no claims taken. | 1 |
| Indexed, not verified | Seen only as a news-index or search listing; never read. Recorded for completeness. | 4 |
Limits
What are the limits of this record?
- We cannot see deleted or paywalled versions of pages, or edits made without updating the page’s metadata.
- News indexes are incomplete. Coverage in languages we did not search for may exist.
- The video’s view count and the company’s 11,000+ figure are point-in-time numbers reported by others; we have no independent count.
- Our checks of official channels are snapshots. A page that was not live on the day we checked may go live later.
Corrections
How are corrections handled?
If an entry is wrong — a time, a byline, a claim attributed to the wrong outlet — we correct it, change the page’s “Updated” date, and add an entry to the updates log describing the correction. Entries are not silently removed. Publishers who believe their report is misdescribed can contact Influish through the details on influish.com; please include the page address and what should change.
Start with the tracker home or the timeline.