Public Source Limitations
Every CLCI Hub entry is built from publicly available sources — court records, government reports, peer-reviewed academic work, journalism, books, documentaries, and ex-member testimony already in the public record. This is a deliberate methodological choice and it has specific limitations. This page documents them.
Why public-source only
Restricting to public sources keeps the catalogue verifiable, citable, and defensible. A reader, a journalist, an academic, or a court can trace every editorial claim back to a source that exists outside our editorial process. We do not rely on private communications with current or former members; we do not host private accusations; we do not publish material that cannot be independently checked.
What this excludes
- Private testimony where the witness has not chosen to make it public.
- Internal group documents that have not become part of the public record (through litigation, leaks, or voluntary disclosure).
- Active investigations not yet reported.
- Allegations that exist only in private channels.
- Concerns raised through our own channels that the originator has not also made public.
Structural biases this produces
Public-source dependence is not neutral with respect to which groups appear well-evidenced and which appear thinly-evidenced. Specifically:
- English-language bias. Anglophone groups are over-represented because the public-source corpus we can access is heavily English-dominated.
- High-profile bias. Groups attracting journalistic and academic attention have richer source bases; smaller groups that have done less to attract attention may have thin entries even where harm exists.
- Recency bias. Recent groups have less time to accumulate court records, academic studies, and ex-member memoirs. Online-first groups particularly under-evidenced.
- Litigation bias. Groups that aggressively litigate against critics may have suppressed sources we cannot access, biasing the apparent picture toward 'less documented harm'.
- Closed-community bias. Groups that maintain tight information control over members may have very little public ex-member testimony, even where exits are common.
- Privilege bias. Public ex-member testimony is easier to publish for ex-members with social, professional, and financial resources; survivors without those resources are under-represented.
What this means for confidence ratings
The confidence rating on each profile is partly a reflection of public-source density. A 'low confidence' rating does not mean the score is wrong; it means the public-source base supporting the score is thin. New sources can move both confidence and score over time. See also research methodology limitations.
What we ask of readers
- Treat thin-source entries as preliminary. Do not act on a single thinly-supported entry as if it were a thoroughly-documented one.
- Where you know of public sources we have not used, send them via /corrections.
- Do not interpret 'absence of evidence' on this site as evidence that no harm occurred. Many real harms do not produce public-source documentation.
- Cite the limitations alongside any aggregate analysis. The catalogue's uneven coverage matters when aggregating across categories.