Our first quarterly report: what we got wrong, and what we can't measure yet
When this site went into soft launch at the end of May, How We Communicate promised a report every quarter: the hooks we used and what they produced, what we refuse to do, every correction, and how we moderate. This is the first one. It covers 30 May to 30 September 2026.
Part of that promise turned out to describe a site that does not exist — a comment section, a newsletter, headline tests — and on 23 September we corrected the page itself. It now promises what we can deliver: what we count, what we do not do, and every correction. This report keeps the original headings anyway, so you can see what became of each.
The short version: we corrected a lot, we used no attention hooks at all, and we still cannot tell you how many people read the site, because our own counting was broken for most of the quarter.
Corrections
The corrections log has 28 entries this quarter. Some fix a single sentence; several record whole review passes, each with dozens of changes.
- Six in the first weeks (28 May–4 June): a miscited replication study, a misattributed search-ranking study, an overstated claim about Cambridge Analytica and the Brexit referendum, a report title, a founding date given two different ways, and a researcher’s work described as something it was not.
- Three full review passes before translation (19 September): every source on every page was re-opened. Together they changed more than 85 statements across nearly every page: figures that had moved, sources that did not say what we said they said, and hedges that had gone missing.
- One about a demo (19 September): the tracking demo told most visitors they were protected from trackers when they were not. That was the worst of the quarter, because it told people something false about their own browser.
- One about ourselves (20 September): the privacy page said two analytics tools were running. Neither was.
- Four on 21 and 22 September: a court verdict attributed to a company that was not a party to it, figures corrected on a page but not in the summary cards that link to it, the wrong date and link for a US intelligence statement, and verdicts described as if both companies had lost both cases.
- Thirteen on 23 September, from a full review of the content and the research behind it. Three stand out. Four pages said, in our own voice, that recommendation engines walk users step by step into extremism — a claim our own page on radicalisation calls contested, because the research is split. A settlement between Meta and 51 US attorneys general, reached on 26 August, went unnoticed for a month, and Courts & Liability still described the states’ case as running. And How We Communicate, the page that promised this report, promised moderation reports for comments the site has never had. The other ten range from single facts — the hours of a Dutch help line, the cost of calling a Romanian one, a registration fee, an author’s job title — to a promise, made in six places, that every claim is sourced, which ten pages without a list of sources did not keep.
There were no new entries between 24 and 30 September.
All twenty-eight were found by our own reviews; none came from a reader yet. We would like that to change: tell us.
Hooks we used
None. We have not yet started the social media accounts or the newsletter, so there were no headlines to test and nothing to report. When we start, this section will list every headline we tried and what it did, including any we later think went too far.
What we did add are ways to pass a page on. Since 22 September each of the three demos ends with one thing to do and a button to send the demo to one person; since 23 September every content page has a send button at its foot, and the Share page has plain links that open a message in the app you already use. Nothing is loaded from a platform to do it.
What we did not do
We did not use outrage headlines, buy followers or engagement, or use design tricks to get sign-ups. There is no advertising on the site and no tracking beyond the anonymous counts described on the privacy page.
Moderation
The site has no comment section, and never had one, so there was nothing to moderate. Messages reach us by email.
What we know about readers: almost nothing yet
We count visits with Plausible, a cookieless tool we run on our own server. For most of the quarter it recorded nothing: until 20 September the site loaded it from a wrong address, and until 22 September a missing setting on our own server made it discard almost every visit it received. Both are fixed. From 22 September we count anonymous totals: visits per page, how far visitors get through each of the three demos, which links to other organisations are followed, and how often a demo is sent on to someone else — and whether anyone arrives through it.
That leaves nine days of counting in this quarter, too few to say anything about reach. So this report has no reach figures. The next one will.
How the site is made
Since 22 September every page says at its foot that some content was created with the help of AI tools and may contain errors. The new section How this site is made explains what the tools do and how their mistakes are caught. The claim ledger — every sourced claim on the site, and how it was checked — is now a page of the site too, so you can check the checking.
Translations
Dutch and Romanian editions are complete as drafts: all 66 pages of each. A second AI model has read every one of them beside the English, and the errors it found were corrected. No translated page is published yet: a page goes live only when a native speaker has signed it off. Both editions now have a native reviewer, and since 25 September a reviewer can record a verdict on each page on the site itself. The reading starts in October. The translation status page shows where each page stands, and which languages come next.
If you read one of the other languages on that list and would check a page or two, tell us.
Money
We have not raised any money yet. There is no bank account, because the foundation is still being set up: a Dutch stichting is in process, and until it is registered there is nothing to pay into. Costs so far have been the domain, the small rented server our analytics runs on, and tools, carried personally; the site itself is hosted on Cloudflare’s free plan.
When the foundation exists, this section will list income and costs each quarter, as the About and Donate pages promise.
Next quarter
- Count properly for a full quarter, and publish the first figures here, including the ones that are disappointing.
- Have the native reviewers read both editions, and publish the first translated pages once they have signed them off.
- Register the foundation, so there is somewhere for donations to go.
- Launch the newsletter, and report the headlines it used.
- Report what the quarter cost in money, and not only what it was spent on, as the Donate page promises.