Correction
corr-2026-07-18-connective-clusters
Logged: 2026-07-18
Severity: major
Status: resolved
Affected record: 7 days (2026-06-30…2026-07-17)
Affected day pages: 2026-06-30 2026-07-11 2026-07-13 2026-07-14 2026-07-15 2026-07-16 2026-07-17
Timeline: detected 2026-07-18; acknowledged 2026-07-18; corrected 2026-07-18.
Original rendering unavailable · Corrected rendering unavailable
What happened
Some daily talking points were bound by a connective or attribution phrase rather than a message — e.g. “into the trump administration’s” or “democratic colleagues in demanding the”. Each such key is string-valid (every cited statement contains it verbatim, which is why they clustered) and cleared the >=3 quorum, but the shared span is grammar, not a shared message, so the receipts pointed at unrelated topics. The citation verifier checks verbatim-ness, quorum and attribution — not whether the shared span is a message — so no receipts audit could have caught it. Flagged talking points: 19 across 7 day(s), categorized by reason (18 incomplete syntactic span, 1 attribution frame), both parties (15 D / 4 R — the gate is party-blind; the skew tracks the caucus).
Resolution
A deterministic, party-blind key-admission gate now rejects connective/attribution scaffold keys at generation (run_assemble), and the quorum now counts only distinct document families whose source actually carries the key, so transitively-chained interlopers no longer count toward it. Already-published days are corrected at render time (the same display-time refresh the privacy guard uses): the affected talking points are dropped from every page, and where a day's composite had narrated one, the composite is re-derived from that day's surviving measured statistics by the deterministic composer and labelled 'deterministic template (not a language model)' — the same trusted degradation path used for privacy corrections. No number was changed and no record altered; the underlying statements are retained unaltered (Art. VI). The gate is applied identically to both parties (Art. IV).