Fact-Checking Policy

What checking means here

INTERNATIONALFREELANCERSDAY publishes three kinds of claims that can hurt a reader if wrong: what a platform charges, what freelancers earn, and what tax and legal rules require. Each has its own failure modes, so each gets its own checking discipline. The general rule underneath all three: a claim is verified when it has been traced to a primary source a reader could check themselves, and the article shows its work by naming and, wherever possible, linking that source. Before publication, a second set of eyes reviews every fee figure, every rate benchmark and every tax claim against the sources, not against the draft.

The hierarchy of sources

In descending order of authority:

The primary document. The platform’s own current pricing page and terms of service. The government agency’s own published guidance, the statute, the official rate table. The survey publisher’s own methodology section, not a news story about the survey.
Direct testing. What we observe ourselves with ordinary accounts: the fee actually deducted from a payout, the charge actually applied at checkout, the option actually present in the interface.
On-record accounts. Named people with direct knowledge, such as a freelancer showing us their own transaction record.
Reputable secondary reporting. Used for context and leads, attributed when used, and never the sole basis for a number.

Community forums, Reddit threads and social media posts sit below all of these. They are excellent leads, and often the first place a quiet fee change surfaces, but a thread of angry posts is a reason to go check the primary source, never a substitute for it.

Checking platform fees

Fee claims get the strictest routine, because they are the claims most likely to be silently outdated:

Every figure is read from the platform’s current published schedule at the time of writing, and the article records that verification date.
We reproduce the arithmetic on a worked example, because the advertised service fee is rarely the whole story once payment processing, currency conversion, withdrawal charges and any subscription or bidding costs are included. If our worked example and the platform’s stated percentage diverge, we investigate until we can explain the gap.
Where a platform’s help centre and its terms of service disagree, and they sometimes do, we say so in the article and treat the terms as the binding document.
We keep dated screenshots of pricing pages in our records, so that when a platform changes its schedule we can document what changed and update per our corrections policy.

Checking rate data

Before any earnings benchmark runs, we read the methodology behind it and answer: who collected this, when, from how many respondents, recruited how, in which markets and currencies, and is the headline figure a mean or a median. Self-selected surveys of a platform’s own successful users skew high, and we either say so alongside the number or decline to use the number. We do not merge surveys with incompatible methods into one figure, and a benchmark that cannot answer the questions above does not get published, however quotable it is.

Checking tax and legal claims

Every tax or legal claim is verified against the official source for the specific jurisdiction, meaning the tax authority’s published guidance or the law itself, and labelled with jurisdiction and year in the article. Thresholds, rates and deadlines change annually, so a claim is only ever verified for a stated year. Where official guidance is genuinely ambiguous, we report the ambiguity rather than resolving it by fiat, and we say plainly that a professional should be consulted, consistent with our disclaimer.

When sources conflict

We do not average conflicting figures, pick the most dramatic one, or hide behind phrases like “reports suggest”. Each figure is attributed to whoever published it, with its date, and when credible sources disagree the article says they disagree and explains, where we can, why: different collection periods, different populations, a schedule that changed between the two. Showing the conflict is more useful to a reader than manufacturing false certainty.

Re-verification

Verification decays, so high-stakes articles carry their verification dates and sit in a refresh cycle: fee comparisons and platform guides are re-checked on a regular schedule and immediately when we learn of a change, and tax content is reviewed when fiscal years turn. A dated check that has visibly expired is treated as a defect, not a technicality.

When we still get it wrong

Some errors will survive all of this, and readers are our best remaining detector. If a number on this site fails your own check against the primary source, write to support@internationalfreelancersday.com with the subject line Correction. The corrections policy governs what happens next, and it happens quickly.