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Reader Evaluation of Authenticity & Legitimacy
R-EAL 1.0 — Open standard · Published 5 September 2026 · International Day of Charity
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Category:   Open standard for crowdsourced content credibility
Published:  2026-09-05T00:00:00.000Z
Canonical:  https://r-eal.org
Steward:    Open Conformance Foundation (neutral steward, being established);
            drafted by Society OS Pty Ltd as current owner.

STATUS
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R-EAL is a published open standard (v1.0), released 5 September 2026 on
the International Day of Charity. Later revisions will be versioned and
published under the same royalty-free pledge. You can run it now: see
the reference kit and test vectors.

LICENCE
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This specification text is licensed under Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

R-EAL 1.0 is published under the same irrevocable, royalty-free,
worldwide patent non-assertion pledge as F-ACT. The text is offered
under CC BY 4.0. Both rights are settled in the adopter’s favour.
https://openconformance.org/occ/pledge

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DEFINING PRINCIPLE
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A credibility verdict is only worth trusting if the way it was reached
is itself rigorous, resistant to gaming, reproducible, and legible at a
glance.

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THE FOUR MOVEMENTS
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1. RIGOROUS
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Question:    Was the verdict reached by a sound, weighted method — not a
             raw popularity count?
Requirement: The credential names its aggregation method and marks the
             verdict as agreement-weighted.

2. RESILIENT
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Question:    Can the verdict withstand sockpuppets, brigading and
             coordinated manipulation?
Requirement: Sybil resistance and manipulation resistance are asserted
             as active controls.

3. REPEATABLE
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Question:    Given the same inputs, would anyone deriving the verdict
             again get the same result — and can they carry the
             credential with them?
Requirement: The method is deterministic, the inputs are hashed, and the
             credential is portable.

4. REVEALING
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Question:    Can a reader see the verdict at a glance and then open the
             full reasoning behind it?
Requirement: A glanceable verdict is offered alongside an endpoint that
             explains how it was reached.

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CONFORMANCE TIERS
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E1 — Declared
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The four movements are answerable from the credential itself — the
method, the resistance controls, the deterministic inputs and the
glanceable verdict are all present.

E2 — Corroborated
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Declared only. The credential reports a reader sample across represented
cohorts with cross-cohort agreement — but a document cannot prove the
sample was genuine or independent.

E3 — Provable
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Declared only. The credential points at tamper-evident evidence and a
re-derivation endpoint — real proof means fetching that evidence and
recomputing the verdict.

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Formats: HTML https://r-eal.org/r-eal | JSON https://r-eal.org/r-eal/spec.json
Reference kit: https://r-eal.org/r-eal/reference
Test vectors:  https://r-eal.org/r-eal/test-vectors
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