Editorial policy
TubeTraveler is a live-camera discovery service. When we publish a page about an earthquake, a storm or a festival, we are not reporting the news — we are describing what public agencies have said and which of our cameras happen to be nearby. This page sets out the rules we hold ourselves to.
What we state as fact
Only figures a named agency published. Magnitudes, depths, alert levels, wind speeds, start times and affected-country lists all come from the feed, and the agency is credited on the page with a link to its own record. If a value is not in the feed, no sentence about it appears.
We never generate:
- casualty, injury or death figures;
- damage estimates or cost figures;
- evacuation orders, road closures or official advisories;
- forecasts of our own.
Where two agencies publish different numbers for the same event, we show both links rather than averaging them into a figure nobody published.
What we never claim about camera footage
A camera near an event is not a camera of the event. Unless one of our editors has confirmed what a given stream is showing, we describe the connection in terms of distance and category only:
- “Nearest live camera” — not “live footage of the earthquake”.
- “12 km from the reported event location” — not “camera at the scene”.
- “Matched by location and camera category”.
- “This camera may show general conditions near the area.”
- “The event itself may not be visible from this camera.”
Phrasing that implies we are showing a disaster as it happens — “watch the incident unfold”, “verified footage”, “see the destruction” — is prohibited, and our publishing pipeline rejects text containing it, whether the text was written by our automation or typed by an editor.
Tone
We do not use fear or spectacle to attract clicks. Headlines are descriptive: event type, location, and the one figure that matters. Severity is shown as a small label and a thin colour bar, not as a full-page alert — a serious event should read as serious, not as an emergency broadcast we are in no position to issue.
Natural events and celebrations are presented in separate sections rather than mixed into one feed. It should never look as though a tragedy and a fireworks display are the same kind of content.
Sensitive events
Some events are not appropriate to package alongside a live video player and advertising at all. The following are automatically marked sensitive, which disables advertising on the page and, in most cases, keeps it out of search results:
- shootings, terrorism, war, armed conflict and explosions;
- events described in terms of casualties, fatalities or death tolls;
- crime scenes and serious transport accidents;
- anything an editor marks sensitive for a reason not covered above;
- any event whose sourcing we have not been able to verify.
We also do not create events from unverified reports. General incidents only enter the system when they come from a government or public-agency dataset with a clear location and time, and an editor has reviewed them. Social media posts are never a source.
Advertising
On event pages, advertising is off by default and only enabled when the page is about general conditions or a celebration, is not marked sensitive, and carries enough of our own reporting to clear the indexing threshold described in the methodology. When ads are not permitted, the ad component is not rendered at all — there is no empty slot and no ad script on the page.
Where ads are permitted, they are never placed:
- near player controls or map controls;
- anywhere they could be mistaken for an event status badge or an official source link;
- next to the safety notice;
- above the event summary.
The first advertisement on an event page always appears after the summary, the key figures and the nearest camera.
Automation and human review
The written sections on an event page are assembled from the agency’s structured fields by our own software, then gated on completeness before they can be indexed. Editors can rewrite any of it. Once an editor edits an event, automation stops overwriting the edited fields.
We do not attribute event pages to a named journalist or publication, because no journalist wrote them. Pages are published by TubeTraveler as an organisation, and we do not mark automatically assembled pages up as news articles in structured data.
Corrections
Mistakes get fixed and, where the correction is material, noted. See the corrections page for how to report one, or write to us at ai0lus@proton.me.
TubeTraveler is not an emergency service. Camera footage may be delayed, unavailable, or unrelated to conditions outside the camera’s view. Follow instructions from local authorities and official emergency agencies.