Jev Social Research Evidence Gate

Social research with Jev

Jev is the decision layer, not the social-network client and not the report writer. Use your normal API, fetch or browser tool to collect evidence. Jev ranks discovered posts and, only after a locally checked evidence floor is met, judges whether a bounded projection of that evidence answers the question. You read the sources and write the report.

A preview is not evidence

Track evidence depth explicitly. One source may carry more than one level:

An empty search page means no accessible result was observed for that query. It does not prove that the topic has no discussion.

Mandatory local gate before any Jev call

Apply this gate before constructing or serializing every outbound request:

1. Mark the question, every tried or candidate query and every candidate field locally. A public URL is still person-marked when its path, slug or query identifies an account or person; being public does not make it non-identifying.
2. If any field is private, person-marked or sensitive, stop. Make zero Jev calls and do not silently drop the marked row and send the remainder. Keep the complete local ledger, but make the selected set only the locally screened head of the original order, excluding every locally rejected entry, then use the agent's ordinary no-Jev judgment.
3. Only an all-clear set may be reduced to the outbound projection and passed to jev search.
4. If an allowed jev search call is unavailable, times out or returns unknown, keep the local ledger intact and take that same screened-head baseline. Fail-open never restores a locally rejected entry and never relaxes the privacy gate.

This ordering is the privacy boundary: person-marked results never enter the Jev projection, and fail-open means continuing locally rather than sending less-safe data.

One bounded run

1. Set the evidence floor and the budget before searching. Name the platforms, the maximum query rounds, the target number of distinct opened posts, whether comments or media are required, and a wall-clock limit. Reaching a limit produces a partial report; it does not silently lower the floor.

2. Discover and rank. Ask the routing question, “Which discovered sources should be opened to meet this evidence floor?” Run the mandatory gate above on the question, queries and cards. Only after an all-clear result, convert each card to the minimal outbound projection below, then run jev search. An answer means the cards are enough to make that routing choice: open its selected_ids. It does not mean the research is complete. If the gate stops the call or Jev returns unknown, use the locally screened head of the original order, which is the jev-search fail-open path.

3. Open only selected sources. Fetch them, or load and follow jev-browser-use before any browser navigation. Its critical rules still apply: allowlist the hosts, use a separate automation-owned browser profile, never operate on a page showing credentials, payment or customer data, and verify every result against fresh live-page state. Respect the site's normal login, challenge and rate-limit state; do not bypass an access gate. Try an unreadable source once more on its own, then record the failure instead of looping.

4. Write one local evidence row per canonical source. Keep at least:

   {
     "canonical_url": "https://social.example/post/123",
     "source_url": "https://social.example/post/123",
     "platform": "example",
     "author": "visible account name",
     "published_at": "visible date or unknown",
     "captured_at": "2026-09-27T03:00:00Z",
     "evidence_level": ["opened_post", "comments_read"],
     "support": "short source-grounded paraphrase",
     "limitations": "five top-level comments were visible"
   }

   The full row stays local. Use short quotations only when needed and permitted.

5. Deduplicate before every next round. Normalize mobile/share variants and remove tracking parameters. Use the stable post id when the platform exposes one. Merge newly observed depth into the existing row. Keep a repost, quote-post or reshare with its own canonical URL as a separate reaction record linked by original_url; do not count it as independent support for the original post's claim.

6. Check the floor locally. Compute coverage_met from the ledger counts and required evidence levels. Code owns this check. Jev is never asked to infer it. While it is false, continue within the predeclared budget even if a discovery-routing call returned answer.

7. Ask whether to stop only after coverage_met is true. Re-run the mandatory gate on the research question, minimal evidence candidates and queries for what is still missing. Only after it clears, run a separate jev search round. Pass the increasing round_index and the predeclared max_rounds. If any selected source stayed unreadable after its one retry, also pass "reading_failed": true; from round 2 this bounds the loop as answer_from_what_we_have. Follow every result as defined by jev-search.