TOKHow Yakata works
Politics-led, video-first news for Nigeria. News on the street: the clip is the story, and the text underneath is the source line, not a reprinted article.
Yakata has not launched. This is a working build. There are 0 published stories, no video is rendered yet, and the privacy policy and terms are still in draft pending legal review. Nothing here should be relied on as live news.
How a story gets here
1. FOUNDThe agent reads named sources on a cycle. It takes headlines, links and short summaries, never article bodies, and never from behind a login or paywall.
2. GROUPEDReports of the same event are clustered together, so one event becomes one story rather than five near-identical ones.
3. CHECKEDA story is VERIFIED only with two independent sources. Independence is by owner, so two titles from one company count once.
4. WRITTENA 60-second script in Yakata's own plain English: the hook, what happened, why it matters, and what is still unclear.
5. APPROVEDA named editor walks it through every stage. Nothing publishes itself, and the decision is recorded.
6. PUBLISHEDWith its sources, timestamps, and any corrections attached for the life of the story.
What we will not do
AI drafts. It is never a source.
Every clip carries an AI-compiled, human-checked label. AI helps write; it does not decide what is true, and it cannot publish. Where a script is still a machine draft, an editor must rewrite it before it can go out.
Two independent sources, or we say so
Fewer than two and the story is marked unclear and held. Stories about elections, deaths, crime or breaking events always need a human, whatever the configuration says.
Our own words
Scripts are checked against every source: any run of seven or more words shared with a source is rejected. We do not lightly reword another newsroom’s article and call it ours.
No invented anything
No fabricated quotes, numbers, witnesses or footage. No real person shown doing something they did not do. We never call a winner or a margin before an official result.
Three things that are easy to confuse
Cartoons are satire, and labelled
Stamped Cartoon / Satire for their full run. No fake quotes, no invented actions presented as fact, and no realistic likeness of a real person.
Polls are not surveys
An open audience poll measures the readers who chose to answer it. It is nonrepresentative and is never a basis for calling an election. See the polls.
Predictions are not results
Participant opinion, sourced third-party models, and confirmed official results are three different things and are never blended into one number. Nothing is staked and nothing is paid out. See the predictions.
Corrections are public
Every change to a published story is recorded on the story itself, with who made it and when. We do not quietly edit a story to hide a material correction, and a retracted story is removed from the site rather than left standing.
Five commitments
From the Yakata privacy policy. These do not change without notice being given first.
- Minimal collection is the default design rule for every feature.
- Poll voting stays anonymous. No account is needed to answer, and a vote cannot be traced back to you or linked to your answer in another poll.
- Personal data is never sold.
- Location never goes below city level and never turns itself on.
- Any change to these is announced before it takes effect, not after.
The full privacy policy and terms of use are in draft and are not published here. They need review by counsel in Nigeria before launch, and publishing unreviewed legal text would be worse than publishing none.
Corrections and complaints
If something here is wrong, we want to know. A monitored corrections and takedown address has not been set up yet, so rather than print one that nobody reads, this page will carry it once it exists. That is one of the items blocking launch.